


The Black Ring

by krohgar



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gay, Gay Sex, Growth, Jock Straps, M/M, Muscles, Orcs, Pagan Gods, Transformation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-04-24 18:06:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 37,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19178611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krohgar/pseuds/krohgar
Summary: Logan is a recent college graduate trying to find his way in the world when he arrives in Granite Heights. The simple, reclusive, working-class town has its own secrets to reveal as Logan discovers the freedom to see himself for who he is. When he gets caught up in a curse as old as a god, he must choose between his fear and his desire in this story of lust, love, brotherhood, and self-discovery. And maybe orcs.





	1. Granite Heights

The beginning of this whole, weird story began back in May. I had just moved out of my parents’ place—a little late, I was always a late bloomer—to a sort of up-and-coming town in west Pennsylvania. I was an English major in college, which amounted to little, it seemed, but I found work in a call center near Harrisburg and a little apartment in an old factory town nestled deep in some wooded hills a ways north. To make ends meet, I spent the evenings and most weekends loading mulch, rock, dirt, and a lot of other stuff for contractors at a locally owned landscaping business.

My name’s Logan. I’m just shy of six feet, lankier but starting to fill out in my mid-twenties, and always just a little afraid of doing some of the weirder stuff that’s always in the back of my head. Growing up with my parents, who were avowed Methodists and rarely left their own social bubbles, my quirkiness was always noted but never encouraged. I knew I was different once hormones hit around ten years, and then figured out I was probably into guys around twelve, but I kept that buried until college, came out to my parents a little later, and then kept it mostly in awkward silence when I met their contemptuous gaze.

I always felt a little bad about my sexuality. In college, I came to explore a lot of intellectual avenues blocked off from a kid growing up in a heavy church community. Race, sex, gender, economics, politics, music—I laugh sometimes even now, remembering when I told my eighth-grade chorus instructor that I didn’t _understand_ what secular music could even talk about devoid of God. I knew all of this would never jive with my family back home, but a part of me still conflicted with even this new community.

Coming out was one thing. Opening yourself up to the chaos of new ideas another. But even though I was pretty stone cold gay, I was into just, well... I tried to describe it as “normal” guys, but saying that, I knew it was pretty stupid. What was normal? The cisgender nature of my attraction—something I could no more control than I could what made my dick hard—always made me feel guilty. I felt like I should be more open, and that this somehow made me a hypocrite. I never discouraged non-normative expression in my college friends—encouraged it often, celebrated it with them and for them—but it was never me.

Moving into Granite Heights was probably inevitable, I guess. Maybe even a capitulation to all those ideas of masculine identity bred into me from childhood—ideas that seemed oddly universal but always just out of my reach.

Granite Heights was basically one main street, creatively called Main Street, with brick buildings from the 1920s, buildings that facilitated the tank industry at the nearby blue-collar factories that died by the time Vietnam had rolled around. It had sunk into a sort of economic depression for decades, causing some to move out but the older families to dig their heels in deeper. There was a bank that was carved and set from the town’s very own granite, its namesake, and it looked like it belonged on a New York city street corner. There was a hardware store just named Tim’s, and attached to that his landscape business with product staged out back. There was a diner that hadn’t changed its menu since the 50s but had great homefries and milkshakes. A middle and high school, the combined mayor’s office space, police station, and jail down in the basement. A small mom and pop-style gas station with a small shop stocked with “lowest price allowed by law” cigarettes and hard liquor—the town’s only non-white member, a dark-skinned man named Paul that never seemed to talk about where he came from—held down the fort there from 6:00 AM to midnight all week. A grocery store with the old pressure-activated rubber mats that mad the doors open, dingy florescent lights flickering inside. A gym with stuff that said Gold’s Gym but wasn’t, old iron plates that had seen better days and showers that looked like they belonged in a nuclear holocaust bunker.

Off Main Street were several other streets, a small park down by the creek with pavilions and rusted out public grills, a statue to some war. No road laid flat or straight here—they careened around centuries-old stone buildings from the late 1700s, twisted around ravines, followed old Indian paths. There were huddles of stones from forgotten structures—homes, maybe. Maybe churches.

There were no less than four churches, all different denominations whose members kept to themselves and hissed their scandalous secrets about each other over Sunday lunch at the diner—Missy's, it was called, although its current owner was a bald, hairy, greasy man with a short temper in his late forties. His name was Mr. Sullivan. There was one combined cemetery. Its graves were well-kept but sun-bleached and mossy.

My apartment is part of a small complex built in the 80s up the hill from Main Street. The Granite Heights Luxury Condos are a simple, L-shaped structure with a parking lot shaded by birch trees. I’m on the second floor in the center, with a watermarked window that overlooks the sharp drop down to Main. My carpet is stained some strange colors from water damage from an evicted renter. My appliances are old but reliable, washer and dryer down the hall. The living space, kitchen, and eating area are all the same thing. I have a small bedroom with a queen mattress and blinds I rarely open, and a small bathroom next to that.

I can see the old tank factory from my window. Brick smokestacks five, six stories high, tall, blown out glass windows, crude corrugated steel eaves. It’s all overgrown, now. Hemlock and dogwood and birch, and sumac and ivy and grass tall and thick. It’s a structure that seems to exude a heavy, dark mystery from its aching, gaping windows and doors, a secret whispered in the graffiti up and down its old sides. A carcass of industry reclaimed by land older than man, a land as old as myth.

I took some lit classes in college. I guess sometimes those things leaked through the more practical image that my life had become: work. Fifty, sixty-hour weeks.

Anyway, it was late May, and summer was setting in early, when I met Liam and Hunt and Ethan. I had slowly settled into the life of sweatpants and long socks, jeans and boots, flannel and stuff like that—it was what guys around me wore, and growing up I’d always felt this weird duplicity dressing that way, like it was a lie or its tie to my sexualization of men made it wrong to indulge.

I hadn’t fallen for a guy as hard as Liam since high school.

Part of it was the normality of it. I’d been friend with a lot of girls growing up, and just a lot of eccentric personalities that always seemed to criticize exactly what I guess I was shallowly drawn to. Art students, drama students, music and performers, hipsters, activists, that kind of thing. Liam and his friends were the first guys that kind of took me in, did what seemed to me to be normal things. I relished it. Thrived on it. It felt like it filled in something missing in my life, maybe even my soul. It made me feel whole in a way that’s hard to describe.

And it was either my new sense of freedom or some late hit of hormonal bliss that made my body go into sex overdrive. Everything seemed of significance. Every common, normal thing for so many other guys felt alive, like an adventure. _This is what it’s like_ , I would sometimes think to myself. _This is what drives you crazy._

I met Liam and Hunt on that first Saturday loading trucks at Tim’s. Those first couple weeks were bitter cold mornings, and Liam was in charge of getting me up to speed. He had these eyes I couldn’t look at or I would drown in them—eyes that were like brilliant, silver crystals, somehow. Quicksilver. Mercury.

Maybe to other people they just looked like a grey blue. To me, they looked like the moon.

He was still laughing at me with that smirk at the corners of his eyes when I was locked in a trance, everything sort of falling away around him that crisp, damp May morning. I was wearing what seemed to me in my labor ignorance to be a perfectly adequate hoodie to ward off the cold and wet in those early hours. I was shaking like a wet dog, breath a fog before my face, before an hour had passed.

“Here bud,” he said. His voice was...textured, I guess. Resolute. Defined by the thoroughness but simplicity of the confines of its coarse, firm, but carefree expression. _Bud_ , I remember thinking. I remember wondering why that term made my heart go crazy coming from him. It was stupid.

He went to his locker—there were some for the workers in the back of the tool shop—and fetched out his old hoodie with the Tim’s Landscaping logo stretched across the back. It was huge on me. Liam was huge.

Liam was huge.

It just kept echoing in my head. Liam was just fucking huge. His biceps, his shoulders, his traps, his pecs, his thighs. What should have been jeans made of an industrially resistant fabric spread like tights on him in all the right places. Fabric that was designed to resist could not resist him. And he either knew how it made others look at him and didn’t care, or didn’t know and didn’t care to know.

He spent enough time at that slipshod gym to answer that conundrum.

The sweatshirt, I remember, was kind of a brown-grey. The fabric had probably once been plush, thick. He may have washed it a couple times, but seeing as he always just wore it over his shirts and then peeled his new one off and stuffed it in his locker, I doubted it. The fabric had this kind of...build-up in it. Not sweat, per say, but kind of the essence of him. A subtle mix of the way his body naturally smelled and some basic body spray that had a woodsy scent to it, and maybe also the essence of the places he’d worn it to for years. And the fabric, itself, was still strong, but sort of packed densely, like snow after tires run over it.

In those and other ways, it felt like a symbol of him, an echo.

I half expected him to laugh again when he saw it hanging on me like a limp sack, but he just shrugged, tossed me a pair of used work gloves, and said I should probably bulk up for this job. And get some more suitable clothes.

He was dirty blonde, with those strange prismatic eyes, and a thick but short-kept beard from jaw to jaw. There was just a broadness to everything about him, even the way he moved. And he had this septum piercing that drove me crazy, just a piece of thick metal hanging from his nose like it was no big deal. He had a house in a row with a dozen others that he shared with Hunt and Ethan, on a street next to the old, overgrown factory.

Hunt was... well, for starters, his last name was Hunt, but I never got his first name, or maybe I did and just forgot. I want to say Will? He was Tim’s son and helped run the hardware store up front when he wasn’t helping load raw materials out back. He was about the same body type as me, but had a dense, wiry musculature. He was a little shorter than me, brown hair buzzed back on the sides, and just columns of piercings up and down both ears and in his one eyebrow. He was quick to laugh, to talk, to mock anything and everyone, and seemed to take immense delight in it. He lost his mom in a flood down by the creek a long time ago, leaving just him and his sister and father.

And Ethan was just kind of this stocky guy with a belly that somehow fit him perfectly. He wore Vans a lot, and a ball cap. He trucked for the quarry on the other side of the hills and worked the shop in his off time, sometimes, under the table. His family lost hundreds of thousands in the recession, and the familial and social stresses that caused made him flee the nest at the ripe age of eighteen. He smoked. I had the sense that he carried the mental systems of that environment in his head to this day.

“Don’t think I’ve seen you around before. You move from...somewhere?” Liam just kept at the casual conversation as he rammed a pallet jack under a stack of top soil bags. There were 48 of them on that pallet, and each one weighed about 75 pounds with water weight. He yanked it backward like it was a shopping cart.

“I, ah... Yeah. East, a little town you probably never heard of past 81.” When I talked, I realized I was struggling between identities. The easy, fluid rhetoric I took for granted in college, and something more... basic, I guess. I internally analyzed everything I said—the words, the sound, the expressions that accompanied them. Should I be funny? Fatalistic? Sarcastic? Frank? How did guys talk to other guys? Is this how straight guys felt trying to talk to girls?

The work gloves smelled pretty bad.

“I guess that’s how you could describe this place, too. Lot of small towns in PA.”

Should I laugh? Keep it going? Talk about some other aspect of this single way we related, the fluke of the area we happened to live in?

I don’t think I said anything at all, in hindsight.

The rest of the day turned out pretty rainy. Overcast with thick drops of water sniping us from the eaves. Liam showed me the basics of how all this stuff worked: shifting product around, condensing pallets, the different types of rock and how they’re typically used in landscape. Different formats of mulch—apparently there was more to it than black or red—and how last the colors, textures, and other attributes would last. I tried to focus but I knew I’d forget it all by the next day.

I kept just...looking at him. I didn’t want him to notice because that would be weird, but a part of me _did_ want him to notice because...what? I wanted him to know I liked him, I guess. That I was available. The way his hoodie just...coiled around his arms like skin. You could actually see every part of him moving underneath. He picked up six landscape timbers—not necessarily heavy, but awkward to handle—and his pecs just...popped. Pressed.

He side-eyed me and grinned.

I spent the rest of the day avoiding him.

Hunt, it turned out, was crazy into occult shit. Shit. I thought about that, too, how just...language I wouldn’t normally have used so flippantly slowly entered into my dialect.

“Shit’s rough, dude,” Hunt said, yanking back a bag of fertilizer over a pile as it split open. “Fuck’s sake.”

Anyway, Hunt was pretty nice. The whole occult thing was weird at first. In college, I’d had a couple friends experimenting there. New Age stuff, or spiritualism, or healing crystals. Hunt was...kind of different about it. I use the term “occult” kind of liberally here because I didn’t know how else to describe the way he looked at the world.

“You know, when I was a kid,” he said that Sunday—it was sunnier, thankfully, and warm, “I used to follow the creek down under that old concrete bridge? You know, that one that shoots off Spruce toward the old factory. That one. Anyway, I used to follow this path that ran by the creek, and it went under that concrete bridge. Shit’s old. Probably forty, fifty years. It’s all closed off now, graffiti and shit. You can see the running water through holes, see rebar rusting. I used to like hanging out under there when the summer was hot—just that metallic smell of the creek, and that cool water that looked black, and I’d look up at the graffiti and the breaking bridge and just... loved it, you know?”

I was trying—and failing—to wrap a pallet of patio block with what looked like the world’s largest Saran wrap roll. “I...don’t think I do?”

“Dude, chill. We got all day.”

“I just want to get it done.”

He shook his head, his piercings glinting for a moment in the sunlight as he knocked his head back. “You just gotta know all this is just bullshit, you know? Concrete, metal, it all just rots away. Nature always wins, or man destroys himself.”

“I don’t want to get fired.”

He laughed. When Hunt laughed, you saw a lot of his teeth, for some reason. “You’re such a tightass. Just chill for a fucking minute, okay dude?”

I scanned the yard to make sure no one was watching. Liam was sawing some split rail in half for some reason. He was just in cargo shorts and a simple green tee. He seemed to sweat a lot for no reason. I don’t know how long I was staring at him, but at some point, I phased back into whatever Hunt was talking about and apparently missed a lot.

“All I’m saying is there’s _stuff_ out there older than men, you know? Maybe our ancestors brought them with them from Ireland or Scotland or Sweden, maybe they’ve always been here. Faeries and goblins and spirits. You can’t touch a tree, touch a rock, put your hand in a creek and tell me there’s not some god that made it, that owns it, that makes it feel...sacred, I guess. Weird stuff happens out in the woods. I know it.”

For my part, it was late afternoon and the sun and the mid spring warmth combined sent my mind wandering, my eyes wandering. I stood there for a while, and there was gravel beneath my kicks, and there was a soft breeze, and there was the dark green leaves moving so softly and then suddenly and then softly again. It felt like I was lifting, lifting out of me, like my eyes were moving forward but my body was sleeping behind me, content and unneeded. And I was looking at the town and the people going up and down Main and a dog barked somewhere and there was the anthem and its echo. And there was the factory on the far side of town, now not so far, and the sumac and the ivy and the ages twisting and edging into its joints, between the brick seams, feeding on the sunlight but roots needing that vorpal darkness hunkering underneath its massive skeleton. And my sight moved to the gaping window, its edges raw, two stories high and six feet wide, the vines pushing in like thick ropes, a walnut tree jutting out to one side, and I was staring into the darkness inside, and my mind was buzzing, and sound was spinning, and it was drawing me in and it felt _hungry_ , somehow, like it needed to consume my sight, my mind, my soul, even, and in that sleepy late afternoon sun the warmth lapped at my body like waves on a beach and I didn’t mind if I was devoured by that darkness within the ruins of man and forest. And then...

I shook my head. Hunt and Liam were there suddenly, Liam cracking his neck.

Hunt motioned at me. “This guy needs some chill time, yeah? Bro’s all wound up.”

Liam shrugged. “Sure. We’re hitting the gym, right?”

“Yeah, man,” Hunt said, and he turned his eyes on me. “You good with that, dude?”

“I, uh...”

“Get swole with us?” Hunt laughed, clapped his hand on my back. My brain didn’t know how to take the message.

“I don’t know how to-I don’t-I never-”

Liam whistled. “Wow, man. Hunt’s right. You’re all kinds of wound up.”

And he clasped his hand on my shoulder.

Holy _fuck_.

Maybe it was some sense of male intimacy. It didn’t need to be sexual. It didn’t need to be anything. Just that contact—his strong hand just gripping my shoulder, squeezing it a little, it felt good—and he just forced that eye contact on me, and I tried not to look into him because I knew what it would do to me, but I did, and I think I stammered some more, and that was probably one of the few times I just got rock hard and felt it and knew it in public like that. And he just kept looking into me, too, somehow. I knew this whole exchange lasted maybe three seconds, but I would have done anything he said in that moment. I would’ve jumped ass naked into the creek. Did he have this power over everyone, I wondered? Was this charisma? Was this just me being really fucking gay for him? And looking down his arm, at that beautiful, thick mass that was the full-bodied head of his upper right pec, and then from that up a neck that would put a bull to shame, and then at that thick, short beard I just wanted to put my hands into, my face into, and those damn _eyes_.

“Yeah, man,” I said, and it didn’t sound weird.

“Alright!” he said, clapping my shoulder and turning for the shop.

“Alright,” I echoed, feeling and hearing a shakiness in my voice.

Hunt just gave me a weird look. “Well, bring shorts, I guess. Those kicks are fine. Be there at 11:00, drink your pre-workout if you’ve got it.” He cupped his hand toward Liam. “Gonna wreck this boiii tonight, eh, Liam?”

Liam hollered something back and Hunt went cheering and bounding after him.

My head was spinning. It all sounded so stupid, so cringy, so...great. It felt great.

I tried to laugh a little.

I had no idea what I was doing, but somehow Liam made it feel fine.

 

I showed up a little early to the gym that Sunday night. There wasn’t a parking lot—you had to park on the road—but I felt so weird _going to the gym_ that it somehow also made me feel guilty. Guilty of, I don’t know. Pretending to be someone I wasn’t? Lying? Indulging this disgustingly stereotypical part of western masculinity? I felt weird being seen. I actually skirted around one of the street lights.

I also had to be at the call center by 7:00 the next morning, and it took about forty-five minutes to get into the city, which meant I’d be leaving around 6:00 AM.

So, when Liam handed me “pre-workout” and explained what it did, I was justifiably hesitant. It was in a shaker he brought from home. Just blue water.

I stood there in Liam’s old hoodie he let me borrow at work, feeling kind of silly in how big it was on me. For Liam’s part, he was in some grey mesh shorts and the same green tee he wore to work. The sweat was all dried, but there were dirt stains here and there. The street light glinted off his septum piercing.

“It’s gonna be really, really sweet and you probably won’t like it. I still don’t.” He handed it to me. “Just drink it really fast. Since you’re a half hour early, that’s good. It takes about a half hour to kick in. Then you’ll want to drink a lot of water.”

“Um... what does it, like, do?”

“Just, you know, gives you some good energy to burn through, helps you focus, gets blood pumping.” He downed his own in what seemed one gulp and wiped his mouth with his forearm. “It’ll feel like your skin is kind of buzzing? It’s normal.”

I looked down at the shaker. I knew I had to be up early. How long would it last? I didn’t know. And the shaker was his. I always felt weird sharing...stuff that touched other people’s mouths. Straws. Utensils.

I thought of Liam chugging it for a second.

“Dude, just take it. It’s fine. It’s like creatine and vitamin B basically. It’s not like steroids or something.” He laughed.

“I just, um...”

“Buddy,” he said, looking into my eyes. _Holy fuck holy fuck holyfuckholfu-_ “It’s not a big deal. Just do it.”

And I did.

It didn’t taste wholly awful. It was definitely supposed to taste like blueberry, although it was incredibly sweet. I hacked a little after I downed it all and Liam just clapped my back. I doubled forward despite myself.

“Good. Now, you’re gonna learn some things.”

We got inside and Liam set a duffle bag on the floor by one of the four workout benches. Despite a sort of moldy smell, everything was clean and neat. There was a row of fluorescent lights overhead. Around the benches, there was padding on the floor.

I stood there awkwardly, not really sure if I was expected to just start doing something or wait on him. “Where’s Hunt?” I asked, looking around. I set my phone down and shrugged off the hoodie.

“I don’t think he can make it,” he responded after a moment. I turned to see him looking at a text. “Looks like he needed to pick his sis up or something.” He dropped his phone on his bag. “Guess it’s just you n’ me, bud!”

And he showed me a bunch of things. At first, I was kind of afraid my weird feelings would make it all awkward, but maybe it was the pre-workout, or just focusing on simple tasks and counting reps, but that didn’t really seem to cross my mind for a while. He talked a lot about form—making sure I was pulling the right muscle groups for the lat pulldowns, or keeping my arms at the correct angles for crunching dumbbells (mine were the measly ten pounders, his were around fifty).

I lost track of time. I stopped checking at some point around 1:00 AM, and then I stopped caring. Once I got the basics of something, he didn’t really comment or anything, he just went about his own method next to me. Sometimes it was the same workout, sometimes something else. I felt that buzzing still, and as we went harder and longer, I could feel a sort of...tightness, I guess, in my arms and chest. A full, tight feeling.

It felt amazing.

I looked down at myself, turning my biceps around to my triceps, squeezing. It didn’t look different, maybe a little sweat, but I could feel them throbbing. My head was a haze—maybe it was my blood flowing, but everything took on a new significance. The light around me felt different. Gravity felt a little odd. It almost felt like I was going through a tunnel—things at the periphery of my vision lost importance.

It felt, somehow, sort of spiritual.

I looked up at the floor-to-ceiling mirror. I looked at myself, admiring myself.

I noticed Liam was looking at me—huge, sweating like a beast, pushing his own arms straight out in front of him and letting his shelf jump under his neck. He cocked his head a little to one side, looking at me with a grin, looking down his nose, down the septum piercing.

“You feel it, bro?”

“I, um...”

He stepped closer, rolling his shoulders, clapping his massive hand on my back. “You like it, don’t ya? Hard not to.” He looked at me, smiled, turned his head toward his right arm. He brought it up slowly, fist angling in as he flexed his bicep.

I swear I could _hear_ his skin, his muscle stretching. Growing. The veins in it popped and squirmed.

And that ring in his nose—was it glowing?

I was transfixed. I couldn’t stop watching. He turned his arm around, flex out the triceps. Flipped it back again to admire the bicep.

I felt his other hand slide down from my shoulder to my upper back, then lower, lower...

He held his flex, hovering his hand over my lower back, just above the tailbone. I could feel a static there, a warmth, as if his sheer will bridged the gap between his floating fingers and my back. The buzzing in my head swelled. His grin deepened.

His green tee’s sleeve began to rip over his bulging muscle.

He let it happen. Slowly, irresistibly, the shredding of his green shirt’s sleeve echoed through the dimly lit gym. Everything about him got slightly—just slightly—larger. I could...hear him grow. Just slightly. I could feel the heat of the blood rushing through him.

His teeth showed.

Then something even weirder happened.

I don’t know if it was a trick of the light—the florescent bulb above us flickered for just a second, a metallic, popping sound—but for just a moment there was... I don’t know. It seemed odd then, until much later when I came to know the impossible things of Granite Heights. But there was, jutting up from either corner of his broad, toothy grin, a pair of tusks. One bigger on the outside, and a smaller one next to that, mirrored on either side of his mouth.

His strong, firm hand almost landed on my lower back. His fingers grazed me—I swear I could feel them against my raw skin, but I know I was wearing a shirt. It felt like fire, like electricity. Involuntarily, I could _feel_ my body shifting, my ass pushing up and out, begging for more, for anything.

I shook my head and jolted away.

“What the _fuck!”_ The words left me in a raspy, breathless garble. I was panting.

But when I looked back over, Liam was...just Liam. Big, but not bigger than I remembered. Green tee a little sweaty, but no tusks. He was just standing there, looking at me weirdly. His left hand still floated where it had touched my back—or did it? Had it all been in my head?

“Problem, buddy?” he asked sympathetically with a vague smile.

The florescent light overhead flickered again.

“No, I just... I have to be at the call center by 7:00.” I began looking around, trying to find my phone. I picked it up. “Holy _fuck!_ It’s... how is it this late?” It was almost 4:00 AM.

Liam just shrugged, grinning. “That’s what happens, bro.” He motioned at the weights. “Shit’s addicting.”

“I have to go. I have to—oh, my god, I’m going to be so tired tomorrow.” I grabbed my phone, Liam’s old hoodie, Liam’s empty shaker. I looked at it, then tried to hand it back to him.

He waved me away. “It’s cool, bud. You can keep it. You’ll need it.” He smiled.

“I don’t know if I’ll really use it that much.”

He laughed. “I saw the look in your eyes. You’ll be back.”

As I turned to leave, I took one last look at him. And just at the end of his right t-shirt sleeve, I saw it.

It was shredded a good two inches up his arm.

I felt a tingle go down my spine, down my back, down deep into a part of me that felt... I just needed to get out of there before I went crazy.

As the door closed behind me, Liam went back to his reps. I didn’t know how long he could keep at it, but I didn’t sleep at all that morning, and when my phone buzzed my 5:30 alarm, I barely made it to the call center on time.

All I could think of for that eight hours of phone complaints was Liam’s hand, the feeling of it tantalizing me at the end of a vanishing memory.


	2. The Cookout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Logan gets more than he bargained for when he accepts Hunt's invitation to a cookout at Liam's house by the woods.

For the next four weeks, I kept at the grind. For the weekdays, I just went to the call center, trying to put some space between me and the others. Especially Liam. I felt weird. Maybe vulnerable. I didn’t know how to process that emotion, the feelings I had.

And I still couldn’t process what had to have been an illusion. A trick of the light that night at the gym. Tusks! I laughed it away, but then dwelled on it for hours.

I was so sore for days I could barely move my arms. My chest felt like it would cave in on itself. After a few days, though, there was that amazing, bursting, full feeling. My muscles felt...big. I felt big. _I feel big_ , I remember thinking, looking into my bathroom mirror. Those three words—one syllable each, reducing the pleasure of my existence, the only thing I cared about for those moments down to some stupid, primordial need to be the big male. I let myself wander in the fantasy of it for a minute, then I shook my head and buttoned my polo for work.

I didn’t go back to the gym for those four weeks. I didn’t want to accidentally run into Liam or Hunt. The next weekend after the gym, I worked at the landscaping business like normal, and I tried to avoid everyone, or at least Liam. I mostly only talked to Hunt, who, if you let him, would dive right back into the weird spiritual shit.

“It’s just there’s older, powerful gods out there—you know it, I know it. In the mountains, man, and the rivers. When you look into the forest, they look back at you. And those gods of the natural world? They know us better than we know ourselves.” Hunt was smoking—finished a cig, flicked it into the gravel and stomped it out. He motioned toward the husk of the factory in the distance, overgrown and dark. “You see? We can build our fortresses of cement and steel, but it’s all just pretense, you know? Those gods in the forest know who we are, what we need—we're all just animals doing fancier tricks now than we were in the last millennium, and the one before that. We just want to eat, sleep, shit, and fuck. And maybe find some comfort in love—that's a whole other topic, but generally it means we want to do most of those first things with someone else, someone specific.”

The weekend after that I met Ethan. Whereas Liam was built like a beast, and Hunt had a wiry musculature with a BMI of nothing, Ethan was big in the gut. His arms and chest weren’t quite as big or near as defined as Liam’s, but he could sling blocks like they were nothing. Ethan had a sort of earthy look to him—brown hair, big, black gauges in each ear, a good tan, brown eyes. He always wore his cap, flipping it back when he had to lift a lot. Like I said earlier, Ethan was a trucker for the rest of the week, making some extra cash at Tim’s landscaping on the weekends. He was always worried about cash with what his family went through, spending almost every spare minute working, smoking through a pack a day trying to forget about the stress behind it all.

Ethan didn’t talk—when Hunt introduced us, he just eyed me up and down, nodded, and went back to work. But the third weekend after the gym incident, that changed.

I was minding my own business, wrapping a pallet of mulch and top soil together for a guy that would be by later, when I heard footsteps in the gravel behind me. At first, I assumed it was maybe a contractor looking for Liam, but the person just stood there for a moment.

“You need to go around the bottom again or it won’t hold to the pallet,” Ethan said.

I blinked. “You-what?”

“The pallet,” he repeated, kneeling down to point at the pallet and the plastic wrap. “If you don’t wrap the plastic good around the edges of the pallet, the mulch and stuff can just fall off while we’re forking it into the guy’s truck, or while he’s driving off.”

“I-”

He grunted, rolled his eyes, and grabbed the plastic wrap out of my hands. Then he took the plastic, coiled it into a sort of twine at the one end and tied it to a board in the pallet, jerking the wrap tightly around each corner until the product was secure.

Ethan stood up. “There.” He handed the wrap back to me.

“Thanks,” I said meekly.

As I wrote out a label for the pallet, I was aware of him just standing there, watching me. Not knowing what to make of him, I kept at my task.

“Why’d you come to Granite Heights?” he asked after a while.

“Well, I needed a job.” I wondered where he was going.

“Yeah, there’s jobs everywhere. If you wanted to make bank you wouldn’t’ve come to some backwater town like this one.”

“It’s...well, it’s hard to find a job with the degree I have.”

“Degree?”

“English.”

“Well, that was a stupid idea.”

I looked at him sharply. “I don’t think so.”

He folded his arms, a short of bearish glare coming over his bearded face. “You spent like thousands of dollars on a useless degree, and you ended up in a dead factory town like some blue-collar failure, anyway.”

I sighed. “College isn’t just about getting a job. That wasn’t what it was originally meant for.”

“Then why?”

“Why did I go?” I stuck the written-out label on the plastic, thinking. “I guess it’s because I...wanted to experience something new. I came from a small town, too, although it was probably bigger than this one. I wanted to...meet people from far away, wanted to learn about them. And I needed some space from my parents. They could be...judgmental, I guess.”

“Is that why you’re here? To run away from mommy and daddy and study us like we’re some kind of beehive?” He laughed, then drew out his cigarettes, tapping one out of the box and lighting it.

I leaned against the palletized mulch, feeling his condescension metastasizing into doubt in my chest. It had lingered in my head since graduating, and especially since moving to Granite Heights. Had I made a mistake? Many mistakes? Wasted my money, my time? I looked around at piles of rock and dirt and mulch and block. Was this the best I would ever do? Was this who I was?

“I guess I just... Needed space. To figure out who I am.”

Ethan took a long drag on his cig, the orange glow sucking down the white paper. He held it in for a while, looking at me. Then he exhaled, the smoke wafting out of his nostrils. He nodded. “You’re alright, Logan. But I’ll tell ya what.” He looked over to Liam, who was going through something on a clipboard, then to Hunt and then out to the town. “You stay around here long enough, you’ll find out more than you’re probably ready to admit about yourself.”

And then he just walked away. And that was the first time Ethan talked to me.

 

Four weeks after the whole gym thing with Liam, I felt like enough time had passed that it was all behind us. Heading into the end of June, it was getting hot. It was Saturday, in the nineties, clear skies, and the landscaping business was going to be closed the next day for a team-wide vacation day. We could all spend it however we wanted to, but old Tim Hunt said he was packing some beer up and heading up to the lake north of town.

Hunt found me by the dumpster. “Yo, you wanna come over tonight?”

I was expecting almost any weird, magic mumbo-jumbo out of Hunt’s mouth, but not that. “What?”

“Bro night at our place. Liam wanted to know if you wanted to come. Me, Liam, Ethan. Fire pit, meat on the grill, beer. That kinda thing. You in?”

“I...” I looked away from Hunt across the yard. I watched Liam as he just manhandled a bale of hay by its cords into a truck bed, his traps heaving. He looked over to me with his piercing eyes and nodded. “You know what? Yeah. I’m down for that.”

“Cool.”

“Should I bring something? A...snack or something?”

He laughed, scratching at the shaved side of his head. “Nah man. We got you covered. We’re gonna show ya a good time.”

And then, just like that, we were closing up, hitching the gate shut, and I was back at my apartment.

 

Liam’s house—I guess all three of them lived there, technically, but for simplicity I just call it Liam’s place—was old but well-kept. It was an old, single-story Craftsman style plopped in the middle of a dozen Victorian revivals, all likely built around the late twenties or thirties. Their fronts faced down to town, and their backs had small yards jutting up against the creek, behind which rotted the old tank factory—massive, megalithic.

His porch light was on. I wore my kicks, some cargo shorts, and a t-shirt I won at college. As I walked up the steps to the front door, I peeked to the wide windows on either side—a light was on in one, but both seemed quiet.

I rang the doorbell. Waited.

_We’re gonna show ya a good time_. Hunt’s words echoed in my head. I hadn’t really drunk in a while—lack of time, lack of money, lack of friends to do it with. I kind of forgot about it, honestly.

I rang the doorbell again.

It seemed oddly quiet—it was only 7:00 or so, the sun still up. A car rattled by and I watched it go, scratched my neck. I hadn’t been to the gym since that whole thing with Liam, but just the manual labor at Tim’s had me feeling tight. Swole, I guess. Just a little. The term still felt alien to me.

_Ya like it, don’t ya?_ My imagination jumped back to that tense night. To Liam. To the vascular, dominating stretch of his hulking muscles, his shirt ripping, that toothy grin as he cocked his head to one side. The tusks. _Hard not to._

I shook my head, forcing the throbbing in me back down into my subconscious. I buzzed the doorbell again.

Heavy footsteps. Creaking, old floorboards. A laugh, a joke shot back to answer another. When the door opened, it was Hunt.

I could feel the blood rush to my face.

“Problem, bro?” he said, looking at me weirdly as he scratched his stomach. All he was wearing was sweatpants, some old socks, and a ruddy pair of hiking shoes. Down his shoulders and chest were a series of...I guess they looked cool, but I didn’t know what the tattoos were. Tribal? Some kind of weird occult shit? And he had this soft, brown hair winding down his chest, his belly, down below his waistband.

Hunt looked me up and down, grinning his own toothy smile. “Didn’t need to overdress on our account, bro. You really do need to loosen up.” He winked. “Tightass.”

“I, um...”

He laughed it off. “Just get in, dipshit.”

Inside, it was surprisingly tidy, if spartanly decorated. There were some socks here and there—I saw Liam’s hoodie thrown on a chair, and a couple pair of grimy work boots—but it was otherwise surprisingly clean.

Left of the entrance was a bedroom, a small bathroom, and then a second bedroom. On the right was a third bedroom, a small kitchen, and then the living space with a sliding door to the back yard.

They weren’t inside.

“You can throw your stuff anywhere,” Hunt said, stopping by the couch. “We’re just chilling by the fire out back.”

I looked at him, turning up my hands. “I don’t have anything.”

He laughed again. “Alright, bro. But you’re gonna feel pretty stupid in a sec.”

And just like that Hunt dropped his sweatpants.

I immediately turned away. “What the fuck man!”

“What? You never saw a dude’s package before?” He peeled the sweatpants off around his hiking shoes and just flung it on the couch. “Never play with yourself, bud?” He laughed, slid open the door. Through a pair of densely leafed hardwoods, a warm, orange glow flickered across the back lawn.

I couldn’t help but...look at him. And by him, I mean his dick. It was flaccid, for sure, but probably a little bigger than average, I wanted to say. I’d learn that a lot about them was bigger than average, but not that night. There was a ladder of silver barbell piercings down his shaft.

“Is this just _normal_ for you guys?”

He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, letting me look at it. He shifted his legs apart a little, put a hand behind his head, pushed it out a bit with that stupid smile on his face that said, _Nice, ain’t it?_

That was the first time that night I sincerely began wondering what the actual fuck I’d gotten myself into.

Then he nodded out into the night, winked at me, and walked out, his bare ass bouncing into the dark.

I could feel my pulse pumping.

Liam was out there.

I went out into the warm night, but I kept my clothes on.

 

Worn stockade fencing ran down either side of Liam’s yard, and some overgrown arborvitae. The grass was short and slick. A cool breeze blew up to the back of the house, carrying that metallic, earthy smell of the creek. Ahead, the trees concealed the bonfire but not its light.

I could’ve turned back, then. I could’ve just turned back and not gotten any more mixed up with Liam and Hunt and Ethan. Hell, I could’ve walked away, maybe moved to a different town.

I couldn’t get Hunt’s dong out of my head. I chuckled to myself a little. _Dong_. What a weird word.

And, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, as much as my rational thought—as layers of behavior built up by decades of social conditioning from home—told me this was just wrong and sick and weird, I wanted to see Liam. I _needed_ to see him. His easy smile. That toothy grin. The bigness of him.

The way, it suddenly dawned on me, it felt like he looked out for me.

I don’t think I’d ever had that.

As I walked closer, it felt like my feet weren’t attached to my body, like I was just sliding inexorably toward some irresistible fate. As I got closer, I could hear Hunt hooting and hollering. I guessed that with how concealed the yard was from the neighbors, no one noticed what went on back here. Or maybe their neighbors were just deaf. I heard the distinct, crisp sound of a beer bottle popping open. The fizzing sound as foam shlopped down its side and onto the packed dirt around the bonfire. Hunt’s animated form as he desperately lifted it above his mouth, knocking his head back as the cream dropped down his throat.

I could see the moonlight glittering on the creek as its dark, languid form babbled by, the moon that was caught by just the tip of the factory’s A-frame roof.

The fire was...bigger than I thought it would be. There were rusted lawn chairs sitting in a ring around the fire, an old plastic table with hotdogs and burgers and buns and other stuff all just thrown haphazardly together. There was a small, rusted grill to the side—Ethan was flipping burgers between drags of a cig. Except for his dirty Vans, he was only wearing some boxers, and they left little to the imagination as his firm gut crested above them.

I heard the sudden, dull sound of chopping wood. I turned automatically to look, my brain shutting down awareness of what I saw for just a moment. I wanted to see Liam. I didn’t want to. I wanted to. Everything mixed in my head as the smoky haze of the fire smothered my senses. The whole world could have been watching from the darkness, but the orange glow, the crackling flame, the sizzle of meat on the grill all created this bubble of intimacy, like this was the only space in the whole world and there was nothing else out there.

Liam had a beer in one hand and a hatchet in the other. He had sneakers on, too—the ones he wore to the gym—but otherwise just an old, yellowed jockstrap. His ass. It was just, so... perfect. Full. Hard. They shifted, tensed as he tomahawked that hatchet down with one hand, splitting a chunk of wood with an audible hoot. He laughed, took a few steps back, upended his beer and downed half of it. He pulled at his jock, shifting his balls out, scratching at them, and then tucking them back. His balls. Holy fuck. Soft and firm at the same time, lifting slightly in the sack as he shifted his weight, the folds and ridges of skin undulating around his gift from god.

A beer was suddenly shoved in my hands. Hunt.

“Liam’s a fucking beast, ain’t he?” Hunt said next to me, slapping my ass.

I jumped, yelping, ass tingling. “What the hell, dude!”

He laughed again. “Lighten up, bro. You gotta just chill. Let lose. You need this tonight.” He sucked down another beer, tossed the empty bottle in a pile of others. “Liam’s not my kinda guy, anyway. This dude’s spoken for.” He smiled, poked at Ethan.

“Hunt, if you poke me one more goddamn time I swear to god I’m gonna shove my fist so far up your ass you’ll be the next Muppet.” He didn’t smile. He shoved a metal spatula under a burger and flipped it, patting it down as it sizzled.

I looked between the two of them. Hunt continued to pick on Ethan, enjoying the rise. He danced around Ethan completely naked like it was the most normal thing to do in Liam’s back yard.

Liam stuck the axe in a stump, picked up each half of the split wood, and just chucked them into the fire. He and Hunt seemed to think it was the funniest thing in the world. Ethan grumbled something and tossed the meat on a plate.

Liam turned and looked at me, fire caught up in his crystal eyes. He began to walk—saunter—over, his junk barely contained by the stained jockstrap holding it together. I blinked. I couldn’t move. The way he walked toward me, his beer in one hand and a fresh one in the other, made his jacked thighs jumble his package back and forth hypnotically. He was smiling that easy smile—my brain was short-circuiting trying to figure out what to take in. He was definitely drunk.

“Here ya go, buddy,” he said, stepping close. His musk—a thick, sweet, earthy smell—wafted into me. Did he even shower after work? He shoved the fresh beer in my hands.

I fumbled trying to twist the cap off, brain spinning as that smell entered me. Slowly, it changed. Sort of. It didn’t smell any different, but as that musk filled me, I came to like it. Need it. His shelf glistened in the light of the fire, bouncing with every movement of his body. Was he doing that intentionally? All I could see was him. He was so big he just filled all of my peripheral vision, somehow.

He laughed as I struggled with the beer. “Okay, okay, little bro, give it.” I turned over the bottle wordlessly. “It’s not a twist cap. You gotta pop it off.” And he went over to the grill, hooked the cap on an edge, and slammed the heel of his fist down on it, shooting it off effortlessly.

It immediately started foaming, the froth tumbling everywhere. As he sauntered back over to me, I noticed his dong twitching a little, growing bigger, the jockstrap straining. In his heat, his gravity, I felt my legs, my willpower, everything just melting away but him. The cream ran over his callused knuckles as he neared. He was just a hair’s breadth away from me, coiling my fingers around the bottle as the foam sloshed over our fingers. My eyesight was right at the level of his full pecs—I could see a trickle of sweat sliding between them. He looked at me, then looked down at his proud shelf, squeezing them together. He was showing off, I realized. Not really for himself. For me.

He stepped a little closer. The fabric of his jockstrap just brushed against my own crotch—his was huge, thick, unafraid. Compulsively, I felt myself drawn forward into his bulge, felt the pressure of us touching.

He looked down at me. I looked up at him through the valley of his chest. There was something in his eyes—a strange mix of affection and dominance. He knew he had me, and he knew I wanted to be had.

“Drink your beer,” he said.

I couldn’t have resisted if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to do whatever he said. I wanted to deepthroat that whole bottle for him. The foam gushed over my mouth, down over my chin, splattered all over my t-shirt. He continued to gaze down on me, caught the bottom of the bottle with his fingers, tilted it up until it was gurgling down my throat and then it was empty.

Then he took the empty bottle, pulled me closer by the small of my back so our dicks rubbed against each other firmly, my cargo shorts and his jockstrap preventing what my body wanted more than anything in that moment—actually feeling him, the texture of his log.

He laughed. “Nice, buddy. I’ll get ya another.” And he sauntered back over to the cooler.

We ate. Liam and Ethan downed meat like they couldn’t get enough of it. I had a couple hotdogs and another three beers and then lost count. When I had to take a leak, Liam told me to just go over by the creek.

He followed me.

I could hardly get the piss out of me I was so hard. I tried not to look at Liam’s huge knob as he pulled his strap aside, letting the thing tumble down like god’s own hand meeting the mortal world. It had to at least be ten inches, semi-hard, and when he let loose it was like a racehorse was shooting a gallon of piss into the creek. He grunted to himself, shifted his weight, spread his legs as he grabbed his cock with one meaty hand. He couldn’t get his fingers all the way around it as it grew.

He looked down at me. I kept staring at his dick.

“Like it, little bro?” he asked. “Wanna touch it?”

“I-no, I just... It’s so big.”

He laughed. “You want to get more comfortable?”

“I’m not going...all naked like that,” I said, shaking my dick a couple times and zipping myself up.

With some effort, he tucked his ten-inch cock away, stepped closer. He took my back like he did all those times before, pulled me in. What felt like all the blood in my body rushed down through me, and he pulled my bulge to his and just pressed us together.

“I...”

He grinned. “Like this?”

I remember being unable to feel my hands or feet. Like I was just this buzzing, throbbing pulse, and this pressure at my groin, and then there was just the immensity of him, the solid firmness of him, like a planet, and the heat between us.

He pulled away. I breathed.

He laughed. “Well, I’m not pushing something on you you won’t ask for. Don’t seem right.” He turned toward the creek, winked at me. “I won’t stop you watching, though, since you want to.”

And he just pulled the whole slab out. It was already dripping. He grabbed it with one massive hand, even his huge fingers not curling around completely, and folded his other hand behind his head, sucking in the night with flaring nostrils and letting out a low growl.

Slowly, he rubbed it.

I just stood there, feeling like the slightest wind would blow me over. He pushed his arms forward, bounced his pecs a little, cracked his neck. The skin was the craziest part of it, the way it was thick and soft and firm all at the same time, sticking right out from the tightness of his stomach, one long, thick vein pounding down the shaft to a head so red it was purple.

He went at it for what felt like a half hour. Maybe it was. He groaned, blew hot breath up into the moon-lit sky. Close. He was real close.

“Oh, man. Oh man oh man oh man.”

He was shaking, rocking his hips forward. His butt muscles pushed up, out, flexing.

I looked down at myself. I guess I never buttoned the fly, so my tented boxers were sticking out of my cargo shorts, a dark spot where the tip of my dick was seeping pre through the fabric. I touched it—barely touched it—and the feeling was so intense I almost shot off that second.

It was then that I noticed his septum piercing was glowing.

“Fuck,” Liam said, biting his lip. He grabbed it angrily with both fists, jacked it a good twenty times. Nothing. Harder. He was like a piston working overtime. Nothing.

The metal ring in his nose was glowing so hot it was almost white.

“FUCKIN’ HELL JUST CUM ALREADY!” His face was red, his chest was red. He was trailing sweat.

He couldn’t get it off.

He stopped, his thighs convulsing, dick almost purple, balls jumping in their sack. He leaned heavily against a tree.

“F-fuck,” he whispered, head down.

I snapped out of it, looked at him, huddled like he was. I felt sorry for him.

“What...what happened?” I asked meekly, stepping closer.

“Don’t!” he said sharply, breathily, spittle spraying the bark in front of him. He rattled off a deep, groaning sigh, body still convulsing, trying to get off but for some reason unable to. “Don’t.”

I shook my head. “Liam, what the hell is going on?”

Liam stood up, cracked his back. I noticed his ears—his ears were a little different. Flared a bit at the tips. “I... _ahhh!”_ He shuddered—I could _see_ his dick throbbing, even in the dark. “I can’t...get off.”

I scratched my head. “Well, that’s, like, a condition, isn’t it?”

“N-no, Logan. Like, I can’t... _AHHH!_ ” He shuddered again, held himself up against the tree with a forearm. “I c-can't masturbate. I gotta...fuck...something. Or it just builds and builds and builds.”

This was another one of those moments when I could have just walked away from all the craziness, not gotten any more involved. But, stupid me, seeing him like that—I wanted to help him, needed to. I mean, I wasn’t going to blow him off or anything—come on, no one’s that gay, right?—but he needed to work through something, and I was more than curious at this point.

“Liam,” I said, stepping closer. “What’s going on tonight? Why the fuck is everyone naked and why do I have this feeling something messed the hell up is happening? What did I see the other night at the gym?”

His raging boner was slowing now, softening. Liam breathed deep, leaning his head back, the moonlight catching his opening eyes, the four tusks pushing from his mouth.

“And what the fuck is that! I’m not...imagining this. I’m not crazy.”

He sighed. “I shouldn’t...tell you. He says if we tell people, they’ll think we’re crazy, we’re making it up, and I need to...to get this _out_ of me, holy fuck, Logan! It feels so good it _hurts!”_ He whipped around suddenly, his massive dick, flopping to one side and then the other—there was enough pre dripping out of it that I could just see this constant stream oozing out. I could literally hear it—a kind of juicy, squishing sound as his urethra contracted and jettisoned it forward.

I took a few wary steps backward. “What do you mean, he?”

He tried to tuck his dick back in his jock, but about a third of it poked out the top. Every contact with his boner made him shudder, drool a little. I noticed his nose ring was still glowing, but faintly now as his dick went flaccid.

“And what the fuck is with that nose ring?”

“It’s...a long story. You won’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

“You _won’t_ , Logan. No one does.”

“Who were you talking about? Who was this person that told you this?”

His features now were more or less the Liam I had always known—broad, bigger than life, strong, but human. He sighed, put his hand up as if he were going to take his piercing out, then, as he grabbed it, pulled away.

An identical ring was in his fingers. He offered it to me.

“I...I wanted to give you this. Thought it would go differently than it did. I just...”

By the time I noticed my hand was outstretched to take it from him, he had already dropped it in my palm. It was much heavier—and bigger—than it appeared on him. I looked down at it—it was a dark silver, almost black, but otherwise completely devoid of feature. It had no clasp or obvious way of opening it. I looked at the ring in my hand, then back up at the softly glowing one in his nose, and then back again.

“Liam, how did you...how did you make this second one? How is any of this possible?”

He was looking back through the trees toward the bonfire. “Looks like Ethan and Hunt turned in already.” Then he looked up at the sky. “Actually, the moon’s almost gone. Must be...almost 5:00 by now.”

I looked at him. There was a sad look to him. A lonely look.

“Liam... I’m gonna go.”

He looked down at his sneakers. “Yeah, just...”

“Just what?”

He paused for a moment, the sense of emptiness in him growing, filling his crystal eyes with a depthless horror. “Just...if he comes to you-”

“Who, Liam? Just tell me! Who?”

“-if he comes to you, don’t put the ring on unless it’s what you really want. That’s how he gets you.” He looked at me. “You’ll see him soon. You have his Black Ring.”

I looked down at the object in my hand, an ominous, dark presence. Even as I looked at it, I could almost feel something...looking at me. Watching me. Waiting. Something deep in the forest. Something old, bestial, alive. Hungry.

Liam walked me back through the house—Ethan was snoring like a bear with Hunt sprawled across his great body on the couch. Then to the front door.

I remember leaving wordlessly—Liam didn’t wait in the door, although maybe he watched from one of those darkened windows as I walked down the street. As I made my way back to my apartment, I felt a kind of heat from the ring.

_You’ll see him soon. You have his Black Ring._

I made up my mind. I was done with this craziness.

As I walked down Main toward the hill that led up to the Granite Heights Luxury Condos, I didn’t even slow as came to a storm drain.

I flicked the ring in. It plinked away in metallic whispers as it fell into the depths. I waited to hear it land in some standing water, or maybe rattle along a concrete floor, but there was nothing. Maybe it landed on some leaves.

And I walked home, and I went to bed.


	3. Arcadia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Logan tries to move past the events of the preceding night, but something about them lingers in his dreams, and maybe beyond them.

I remember grabbing something from the fridge as the sun came up out my second story window. I remember that sensation of feeling as though I had really just woken up from a bizarre dream, and that the cookout at Liam’s, all those irrational things I had seen, were all just part of some elaborate delve into my subconscious. That they hadn’t been things shared with other living people.

It was Sunday now. I was exhausted. I kept catching small pebbles between my toes that I had tracked in on my shoes—rocks that had covered the edge of the creek behind the house.

I held the orange juice carton for a moment—I was incredibly thirsty now that the better part of my drunkenness had faded. I closed my eyes for just a moment.

Liam was there under the moonlight, ass naked, both hands handling his immense rod as he jerked at it angrily, violently, his groin thrusting forward as he came so close to cumming, and closer still, but it just wouldn’t shoot. As that thick vein in the side of his massive cock throbbed, as the head of his dick beat red and purple like he was about to shoot it off, as the veins down his arms, his chest, his thighs all convulsed and pulsed and throbbed and begged for release.

And the harder he tried, the brighter, the hotter that ring in his nose burned—cold black and then a dim orange, then bright red, then white hot as it singed his skin, as he cracked his neck, as pleasure burned through him, as his jaw cracked and split and grew wider, as those tusks shot out of his mouth, and that sound like ripping Velcro as his arms, his back, his legs—everything, all of him—grew and grew and his nipples popped and he growled and moaned and rubbed harder and faster and doubled over on his arms and legs and started rubbing his growing cock on the ground like a wild animal in heat but that didn’t work, either, and he just looked up at me with that look in his eyes-

_I need to rip your asshole apart and fill you with my cum—please, please let me—please..._

My eyes flickered open for a moment and the room was dark. I guess I had drawn the curtains and somehow forgot. I rubbed my head, setting the carton down on the counter.

“What’s getting into me?” I remember feeling...dirty, somehow. Guilty. This hedonism, this desire in me—was this the real me, deep inside, begging for release all these years? Was this all I was?

I just needed some air. I went over to the window, drew the shade open, and-

I remember the floor feeling like it fell away from me. I gasped.

The silver morning was gone, replaced with a thick, black sky. The town below was gone, too. It was as if it never had existed. Below me, the woods dropped into a ravine choked with trees, and then the creek, and then the ruins of the factory in the distance.

But below my window, in the flickering, amber light of a streetlamp at the edge of the parking lot, there was a man.

I squinted.

No, not a man. It stood like a man on two legs, but the meat of him--his stomach, chest, all of that—rested slightly forward, the weight distributed slightly differently than a real man. His legs were thick and furry, and ended in hooves. Thick. His stomach, his chest, his arms, his...could it be called manhood? I didn’t know. He wasn’t a man. But he was _huge_. He had an upturned nose, and this rack of immense ram’s horns on his head, and black hair. There were piercings down one eyebrow, and on his heavily pointed ears. He seemed to be, somehow, half goat, maybe. But just...absolutely huge.

Up until this point, he hadn’t seemed to notice me looking down at him from my window, but he appeared to scan the area, looking for...something. He took a step. His hoof clacked against the pavement. The sound echoed through the woods, the leaves stirring.

When he spoke, I could feel his gruff, sultry voice vibrating _inside_ of me, and from everywhere without. It felt like a tickle down my arms and legs, up my inner thighs, teasing me, edging me, tingling up my scrotum, up my balls...

I bit my lip.

_Come to me, human child. Come to the Horned God._

Involuntarily, I stepped toward the window. The step made something deep in me...quiver. Warm. In my ass.

The figure down in the parking lot shifted in my direction. I stopped. What was this creature? This...this all had to be a dream. Just a really messed up dream.

If it was a dream, what did it matter what I did?

I stepped closer to the window. The goat-man's ears pricked at my footfall, and eyes fully black snapped up at me in my window.

When he smiled, his lips twisting into a sort of carnal, predatory grin, I went rock hard.

_I have been waiting for you, Logan. I have waited a long time, and no time at all. Come, that we may be better introduced._

He put out his hand, twisting fingers tipped in long, black nails. He flicked his wrist.

Behind me, my door slapped open. I jumped.

When I turned back to look out the window, the creature was gone.

I kept telling myself that it was just a dream. And it felt good, somehow, every time I did as the creature bid me. Like a reward for...I don’t know. I was still dressed from my night at Liam’s, although my shoes were off. I supposed that was enough.

I looked out into the second floor corridor.

To the left, it was a wall of darkness. When I turned right, the florescent lightbulbs flickered to life down the hallway. I followed them—I half expected someone else to come out, but all the doors remained closed, and after a while the room numbers just kept repeating. “5,” they all said, over and over.

I had almost forgotten what I was doing when there was a low growl from far behind me. Then, like I was in the throat of some vast animal, the ground curled and buckled under me like a tongue undulating up a throat. The lights flickered, went dark, came back on. They were red.

Everything—all light was red.

I heard the unmistakable sound of a brook nearby. Ahead of me.

The hallway ended abruptly, as if someone had come along and simply sliced it away. Ahead of me, there was the creek, and on the far side the woods and the factory up the hill.

_Come, my child. You have yearned for the freedom I offer for many years. Come. Enter into my domain._

I stood at the edge of that black, smooth water. Somehow, without words being said, I implicitly knew the nature of that water, that line in the sand. Beyond, I knew, was the domain of this creature.

Was this the same person Liam had told me about? Warned me about?

When the throbbing grumbled to life inside me, I couldn’t resist it. I couldn’t stop imagining Liam’s naked body, impossibly built, and his huge cock, rubbing against mine, taking my small body like I was nothing, pulling me closer, pressing me against his girth, looking down those mountainous pecs, and somehow seeing in me what I knew was there but tried to ignore.

God, I wanted his cock inside me.

I opened my eyes and I was on the other side of the creek.

_Come_ , the voice rumbled inside me, and I could feel this painful pleasure pounding in my ass, this ache, needing to be rubbed, filled.

_Come._

And I was climbing up the hill, up a ravine of rocks and mud and branches and roots. The dirt in my fingers—it felt right, somehow. And then I was in a vast, flat lot before the factory, its bricks mossy and moldy, towering high into the dark night, only now there was a moon and the moon was blood red and throbbing, beating at the same pace as the hunger inside me. I looked up at the blown-out windows of this edifice of humanity’s imposed order, its rules, its artificiality. Thick vines pushed out at the edges, growing and twisting even as I stood there watching.

Suddenly, where there was only brick and mortar before, the brick fell away and an old, stone door grew into place. Running up and down its edges were glyphs in some dead language, but at its crest was a word, strangely, in English, and it read, “Arcadia.”

Below that, a relief chiseled into each half of the door, was the immaculate being I saw before, standing a full six feet taller than me. His hands were outstretched and upturned, and he had something in each. In the right, there was a torc, and in his left, a coiled serpent. And between his goat’s legs was an enormous, erect phallus, and below that a hefty pair of balls.

_Come_ , came the voice again, and the doors split open.

Inside, it was bright.

The walls of the factory were there, to be sure, and the vague shape of the vaulted ceiling, but it all seemed oddly stretched out, as if this space were endless. It all wrapped around a sky that was somehow there and not there, bright and blue and filled with the sun, and the light and shadows dappled through broad, leafy trees, ancient things older and wiser than anything that grew in Granite Heights. And there were also many spindly trees, and needled ones. The light had this strange, golden, sleeping quality to it, shifting and moving like the last whispers of a familiar song.

I stepped into this space, and through those first trees, into an open, grassy area. There was a spring with crystal water, and behind it was built up with ancient, sandy bricks a sort of fountainhead, and at the top of that fountain lazed the goat-man on a long slab of stone, basking in the warm sun.

“Welcome, Logan, to my realm,” he said. He lifted his far leg up so that his huge dick, his balls all tumbled down his other thigh for me to see.

“I-” I turned away. “Um...”

“Why do you blush? Look. Feel. Be whole.”

Slowly, I looked.

The creature laughed—it rattled through the trees like tiny bells. “Humans have always been odd creatures. Your rules, the way you limit yourselves.”

“W-what are you?”

“I have many names, and many have named me. Even in your modern age, I am transformed, amalgamated between half-remembered gods of old. I am the Horned One. I am Pan. I am the God in the Forest. Inuus. Some call me Cernunnos now, and join me with their Gaelic gods. Many worshiped me in the Arcadia of old, from the evening until the early morning, fornicating and reveling in my honor. Once, Christendom announced me dead, but I still linger in the wild places, both the forests and men’s hearts.”

I squinted at him. “You’re telling me you’re a god?”

In answer, he grabbed his massive dong, filling up his hand like he was grasping a whole animal, rubbing it. I suddenly felt a tightness in my shorts, and then tighter, could hear the fabric straining. I tried to look down, felt my package getting heavier, impossibly heavy. I doubled backward, fell on the ground, moaned.

“I can make you free, Logan,” he whispered, the whisper running along my skin.

I was shaking. The button on my shorts shot off. The zipper pried apart prong by prong.

“All you have to do,” he said, “is pledge yourself to me, and you will know pleasure unlike any mortal, will feel your deepest fantasy come true.”

I was squirming on the ground. I tried to touch my cock, but touching it made the feeling so intense my head spun. I wanted it. I didn’t. I did. My boxers split apart at the crotch. It was too big. Impossible. It flopped out to one side, dripping and dripping.

He snapped his fingers.

The pounding in me stopped. I breathed ragged breaths. My shorts were in shreds.

“Why...why are you doing this?” I asked between breaths. “Why me?”

When he spoke, it was offhandedly, as if relating a rather boring story. “One of my servants has needs that he cannot meet on his own, as per our pact. He...needs relief, I suppose, and it appears you are that for him.”

I looked at him weirdly. “You mean Liam?”

“Mm. Yes, one and the same.”

“What did you...do to him?”

“He was much like you many decades ago. Scrawny. Afraid of his own lusts. Pathetic, really—unwilling to chase after those things which brought his,” he wiggled his eyebrows, “manly parts pleasure. Then Hunt and Ethan found that poor creature, and gave him my Black Ring, and now he is mine.”

“His body, his...he couldn’t cum. He wanted to so badly—why the fuck would he want that?”

“Hm? Oh, he wants that. That high that never ends. But it can drive a man crazy,” he said, chuckling. “So, in his desperation, I allowed him to bring another into the fold. He has chosen you, it would appear. Liam, as you will find out, is a complete power top.” He winked. “I will, of course, fashion you to be his bottom. You will not so much as cum without a dick in your ass, Logan. Would you like that? And, of course, immortality, the kinks of which we would work out as time progresses, and my boon would reshape your body as it desires at its basest level.”

“Well, I threw your ring into a gutter, so-”

“Oh, don’t be so droll. You sincerely think I would let such a thing be lost?”

I felt something, suddenly, in my right hand. When I looked down into it, it was nothing other than the Black Ring.

He smiled—a sort of devilish smile. “Would you like to be my servant, Logan, and know unbridled pleasure?”

And I kept telling myself it was just a dream, just a dream, just a sick, weird dream. I remember thinking that I should probably see a therapist at some point.

I supposed I would see where the rest of the dream went.

I held the Black Ring in front of my eyes—its edges seemed to glimmer with an orange light.

I thought of Liam—that look in his eyes, that imploring look, almost feral at the end. _Let me fuck you. Please, let me fuck you. Please._

“Please,” I whispered.

“Excellent! Then I’m just going to put you under for a spell, hitch on the old ball and chain, and the fun can really get started.” He got to his feet. Hooves. Whatever.

“Wait, I-”

He smiled. The smile was not warm. “You’re mine now, Logan.”

“But-”

“Now, sleep. Sleep, and then wake up.”

And then Pan was holding my head in his hand, and the Black Ring smoldered open, and he put it over my septum and it snapped shut and the pain, the searing pain, shot through me and I tried to scream but I couldn’t, and all that stayed with me as I drifted into blackness was the Horned God’s laughter.


	4. Apotheosis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Logan tries to return to normal life after his run in with otherworldly forces, but he soon discovers a vow given is a vow exacted, and the human world doesn't quite line up with his new reality.

The next morning was Monday, and Monday meant all lines ringing off the hook by 7:00 AM. The call center was a hive of shrill telephone tones met by hasty and overly courteous responses. For my part, I arrived in my usual: a pair of comfortably fitted khaki chinos, a sensibly colored polo, and a pair of leather dress shoes I’d had since my last semester of college. Those days when, in futility, I had thought a satisfying, even fulfilling, career awaited me somewhere out there.

“I found a squir-rel in mah toy-let-”

“Ma’am, this is a bug pest hotline-”

“-wanna get rid of the rascal, but he’s so damn cute.”

I woke in a hurry. By the time I noticed my alarm, it was five after six. I gulped down some orange juice and ruffled through my dirty laundry to find whatever seemed suitable for work. With everything that had happened over the weekend, I hadn’t had the chance to swing down by washer down the hall. It wasn’t until I pushed the bathroom door open that a gasp of fresh air rippled through the room, shifting the musk of cargo shorts stained with mulch dye, the rich head of compost, a tee soaked through with sweat down the back and chest, socks marinated in sweat and mud and dust. Everything I owned smelled like this now—I had picked up some cheap body spray downtown and laid it liberally over my body.

I cracked open the window from the living room with the hand crank—a tiny, impractical thing at the base that seemed more work than it was worth. As the first breaths of fresh air twisted through the room, I realized it was pretty brisk. Pressed for time, I looked for anything to throw over my work clothes. I glanced toward the window in my bedroom, my eyes focusing on the huddled lump on top of my dresser.

Liam’s hoodie.

Was it some weird obsession? Some involuntary bodily function? All I did was look at it, the thick, sturdy brown-grey fabric. I picked it up with both hands. Time seemed to slow, or maybe become less important. I held it up, set my face in it, felt the fabric brush against my—huh, guess I hadn’t shaved all weekend. The threads had all been worth smooth, like an old couch. It felt strong, durable, larger-than-life. It felt like Liam.

I snapped to after a moment, checked my phone. It was 6:25.

“Fuck’s sake.”

I slipped the hoodie over my polo, oddly mismatched against the chinos and dress shoes. Down the hall, down the stairs, out the door to the uneven, patch-strewn parking lot. Dropped into my car seat, slamming the door shut with a metallic clank. I looked up into the rear-view mirror.

_That’s how he gets you_ , Liam said in low tones, in frustration, in defeat. _You’ll see him soon. You have his Black Ring._

I just sat there in shock. The morning birds called in the gently turning branches all around me. The freshness of the new day whispered in its cool, insistent breath. My septum was pierced with that Black Ring. It was smaller than I remembered, like it had shrunk to fit. But it was there.

It had all happened.

A shiver went up my spine. I reached for it, didn’t touch it, was afraid to. The Horned God’s laughter echoed distantly, combining with the creaking of the woods. I looked around me, out into the forest where darkness still held sway. Deeper, deeper. It was strange how, when looking into the woods, if you looked hard enough, there was always a path deeper, always an adventure, always a mystery, a question. Waiting for you.

Pan’s animal grin. Toothy. Hungry. _You’re mine now, Logan._

It was 6:45.

“Shit.”

I knocked it in reverse, swerved around, and floored it for Harrisburg.

 

Somehow, I wasn’t late. That was little consolation for the day that followed, or the looks I got. Pretty much all day.

Before I got inside, I flipped the ring up out of sight into my nose.

Some girl from accounting dropped off my paystub. Liam’s hoodie was laid back over my swiveling chair. She paused, looked me up and down suspiciously.

“You’re in the wrong line of work,” she said, and she almost left it at that. As she turned away, she paused, her eyes lingering. She pointed to her nose. “You have something…is that a piercing?”

I jolted in my seat, turning sharply and feeling my nose. Yep, it was hanging out. I quickly turned it back up. “Nothing. Just a…ah, nose bleed.”

“Mhm,” she said, and I heard the soft pat of her flats on the berber carpet.

Phones rang in the background, in the fog of embarrassment that fell over me while a fresh heat swept my neck, my face. Fervent placations vibrated through the hive, every cell an echo of those around it. The air conditioning kicked on around 10:00 AM, maintaining that sterile equilibrium.

After another twelve calls, I was barely aware of what I said over my headset. I thought of the woods that morning, of the brisk breeze out of the trees, of the cool, dampness of the soil down those winding paths into a darkness dappled with slivers of silver morning light. Of the shuffle of those trees, the maple and dogwood and elm and hickory. The red-brown clay meeting granular sand and pebbles along the banks of the creek, up the ravine. The factory looming, dark inside, sumac clinging to its window frames.

The world of the Horned God hidden in plain sight.

At noon I went for my lunch.

 

I ate in my car.

There was a vending machine that offered a selection of worse-than-you’d-think-but-still-edible sandwiches. I got roast beef on swiss, complimented by a generic bottle of “spring” water.

Outside, I pulled my car up under an old Dutch elm. I knew from childhood, somehow, that they had been almost eradicated by disease. Another anecdote lost to time, to globalization, to people in their mad pursuit of industry and war. Yet here it was, branches wafting peacefully, generously in the early afternoon sun. There was no humidity, and a thick collection of honeysuckle in a copse adjacent the parking lot lent its sweet, airy scent. Everything felt as though it floated on a wish, on a dream, a breath.

I put the windows down.

The sun washed over me. Waves of sound, like the lapping of the sea. Traffic rumbling by distantly. A siren. A dump truck. Someone’s radio. It was all insignificant in the singular but emotionally buoyant in the plural.

I drifted in dreams and sunlight and warmth.

Liam.

I thought of him. We walked into the forest, down that path by the condos. He was wearing some branded muscle tee and mesh shorts and socks that bunched a little above his ankles in his sneakers.

He looked at me. I swam in those eyes, eyes like cool lakes, an expression somehow vacant and full of meaning. Like its casualness was its power. He nodded off into the woods. I followed.

Under his arms, the tee was open down his sides, just hanging there. As if to say, yeah, there are some norms and the world wants us to wear shirts, but fuck it, don’t you like it? The outer tips of my pecs, the way the sun just casually glances off my sides when I stretch nonchalantly.

He noticed me looking, arched his eyebrows, flexed a little. _Like what you see, little bro? Wanna touch it?_

And his massive cock was just casually tenting his shorts, wagging around, balls tumbling.

_I…_

He smiled, brought his arms together in front of him, looked down at his chest, bounced them, smiled again. _Do it. Touch. It’s okay, little buddy._

Slowly, reaching out. Aching in places that felt uncomfortable to say but aching nonetheless.

As I rubbed my hand along the crests, down the middle, he grinned, leaning into me. Put up an arm to lean against a tree. Closer. I was backing away slowly, not sure what this meant. My back hit the trunk and he was still coming closer. His dick was poking out the bottom of his shorts, throbbing so hard I could see it doing so. He leaned in, leaned in, rubbing against me, pushing.

_Liam, I…_

 

My phone was ringing. It was 1:30.

“SHIT.”

Late back from lunch, I kicked my car around, tires burning as I jolted forward. In the front door, frantic. Everything was a rush. Down the hall. Past the water cooler. Past the break room. Between the cubicles.

I was vaguely aware of the sidelong eyes, of the double-takes. I took my headset off its hook and switched it on. Rattled my fingers across the keys to wake up my PC. As I leaned back, I was dimly aware of my computer chair creaking under me, of the arm rests feeling closer. Of my shirt feeling…tighter.

I pulled at my collar. It was hot.

“Is that just me?” I asked generally. “Is the AC on or what?”

I reached up, tried to undo a button on my polo. My bicep felt…big. Like it was a little harder to bend it flat to reach my neck line.

That girl from accounting came back over. No, she was never from accounting. Was that the department head? HR? I want to say she was a Janet, but that felt like a dated name. No one used that, anymore.

“Hey, Logan. I noticed you were late coming back from your—erm… Are you feeling okay?”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah, just a little hot. AC on?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Janet?”

“Who?”

“You. Janet. AC on?”

“My name’s...Susan…” she said, voice trailing off. “I think you need to use the bathroom.”

I thought about this. “No, I think I’m doing okay. Just getting these calls, you know.” I made a big show of going at it on the proprietary response software on the LCD screen. “Doing calls. Doing my job. Getting calls.”

“Logan.”

“Here comes one now, how about that?”

“Logan, listen-”

“Why yes, ma’am. I remember the squirrel situation.” My voice was sucrose sweet, sunlight bright. “I’m not sure that’s a situation we typically handle. Why don’t I-”

“LOGAN.”

Phones kept ringing away. A tense silence settled throughout the office. A printer was running. The water cooler bubbled.

Her face was…not red, not necessarily angry. Frustrated. She was breathing deeply. She took her hand, reached up to her mouth, scratched at the corner.

I looked around my things awkwardly. Set the headset down.

“Take the rest of the day off,” she said. “It’s…it’s almost 2:00. You’ll just miss an hour.” She kept just scratching the corner of her mouth, motioning with her eyes. “Get…whatever thing that is taken care of. Buy some more professional clothes. I don’t know.” She walked away.

Slowly, the usual voices started up again. The chipper answers. The tapping of keys.

I settled back, felt the chair almost double over, leaned forward. My PC screen went into sleep mode.

I stared at the screen for a long moment, shifting my legs. I looked down. My thighs filled up my chinos to the skin. I clenched my…well, my butthole. It was…warm, somehow. Tingly.

I could visibly see my dick trying to push through my pants.

I could feel my blood rushing. Could hear it in my ears.

I twitched my nose, reached to fix the ring.

It was like an electric shock. My fingers recoiled.

“What the fuck?”

I looked into the black LCD monitor, peering into it like I peered into the woods that morning. Deeper, deeper. Elements of reflected light slowly revealed themselves.

There were little teeth poking up from my jaw.

I touched one curiously, disbelieving. Opened my mouth—somehow just slightly wider than I remembered. Not a tooth, I realized.

My beard was a little thicker. Not longer, really, but thicker. I saw the bottom button of my polo straining to hold its ground.

Then it rumbled through me. Everything started to happen quickly and then it wouldn’t stop.

My blood rushed intensely—the roar in my ears became a din. I lurched forward, hands shaking as I leaned heavily on the desk. Throbbing, throbbing. I think I moaned. I closed my eyes hard, opened them, looked at my hands.

The nails thickening, sharpening. The skin running darker, bluish, green like ink shooting through water. The bones shifting, popping, growing. I tensed my forearms and then they wouldn’t relax.

That sound. Like that night at the gym. Like Velcro ripping, like sticks snapping. Liam growing, and bulging and reveling in it.

I closed my eyes again, feeling my chest, my back, my thighs, my calves all swelling, filling. My ass rubbed against the back of my chair and it felt like static, like heat, like I needed to reach back with both hands and spread it apart, put something in it, anything. Holy fuck.

There was sweat running down my eyes, my nose, my arms. I could feel the size S polo giving way.

_My boon will reshape your body as it desires at its basest level._

The face in the screen was me. Wasn’t me. Maybe a truer version of me. Broader, thicker, greener, those tusks pushing out of my jaw, the tips of my ears flaring slightly, almost like a pig’s.

I needed to get out.

When I pushed myself up, my pants rubbed against my cock and I could feel my body throb with pleasure, shake, shudder. I needed to just dry hump something, anything. I looked around, crazy-eyed, focusing on one thing and one thing only: the fire escape. No hallway. No more eyes. It was directly behind me.

When I made for it in a rush, the chair shot back, the headset hanging on by its wire. The squirrel lady was saying hello, hello? You there?

I was lightning fast. My muscles felt like volcanoes shooting out of the earth, like trees cracking and splitting under lightning. I was dimly aware of the bullet-proof glass smashing to pieces as I barreled through the door, of gripping the handle so tightly I could audibly hear it creak and bend as my fingers, not realizing the timing of things with this strength, didn’t let go in time. I looked around frantically, past picnic tables, past a line of elms, ran through the grass—bounded through it, feeling grass between my toes, under my feet, where did my shoes go?

I got to my car. I could barely fit three fingers under the handle release. I squeezed and heard a snap, dropped my weight in, heard the shocks moan and the shell rock.

And then I was flooring it for the condos because what the holy fuck I needed to jerk off and stuff my asshole and I didn’t know how but I would find a way and, shit, I thought, how I was well and truly screwed.

 

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had that level of horniness that you’re driving and just the _rumble_ from the ride makes your parts go nuts, but that was definitely a thing that Monday afternoon. All I could think between lost moments—moments when I couldn’t even think normal thoughts my dick was aching so hard—was holy hell I hope this reverts itself, somehow, or I was definitely losing my job.

If I hadn’t already.

I pulled into the parking lot, an enlarged hand almost touching my erection but then just hovering there, retreating. I didn’t want to make it worse, and I wasn’t in the private, safe confines of my apartment just yet. Holding off felt almost impossible—everything in me just wanted to rip my chinos off and jerk it out. I got up, almost doubled over from the pleasure every footfall brought, every tense brush of fabric against my crotch.

I sort of lumbered to the main entrance—thank god this place was somehow always empty—and up the stairs. Was this what Liam went through? At least Hunt and Ethan could work off this all-consuming sex drive. Liam had no one. He couldn’t even…

Could I? By myself? Would this last until he fucked me?

I fumbled the keys in my hand—my motor skills for such a small chain of objects was basically nil at this point. I dropped them. I picked them up. I dropped them again.

“Fucking dogshit!”

I remember at this point just grabbing the door by the handle and in an effortless motion just popped it off its hinges, stepping in, and laying it over the doorframe.

I dropped to my knees on the carpet, down on all fours, face down, grunting deep, ragged breaths. The water-stained carpet was a welcome sight. I rolled over on my back, heard my polo rip along the back, watched as my chinos popped the zipper and the button went flying. I looked down with a laugh at what just sort of tumbled out from my crotch—it was like a leaden hose just rolled out and lolled to one side, tensing, releasing, tensing, releasing. I grabbed it with a meaty hand and wanked harder than I think was even possible. Seconds turned into minutes. I hit that high, that moment right before release.

And I just _stayed_ there.

Minutes turned into a half hour. My legs twitched. My stomach lurched up and down. I knocked my head back, face contorted somewhere between impossible, animal bliss and abject panic. No release. I just kept rubbing it off over and over and clear pre just oozed down my shaft, over my green sausage fingers, down my thighs.

I shivered. This was impossible. “F-fuck,” I moaned. Growled, more like. Whatever I did was so loud I saw the orange juice carton shudder on the counter. I stopped, looked down at my pulsing cock—huge and green and whacking, whacking against my stomach. I shuddered and sighed at the same time.

“Maybe…if I…” I looked at my fingers, felt something deep and animal inside my ass, like a warm coiling snake, like a single, burning coal, buzzing, tingling.

I reached under me and shifted to one side a little, thick finger rubbing around the puckered ring of my hole. It was…hairier than I remembered. Not that I really did this before. Not that I had to.

But when my finger brushed against just the, I don’t know, lips? I clinched, rubbed, shuddered, growled. I couldn’t remember needing something this bad so viscerally. I put two fingers in my mouth, reached around again, and pushed them in.

My phone buzzed on the counter. I ignored it. Twisted, stretched my fingers. Legs up over my chest, shifting my body around to focus on just that one area of crazed heat and pressure. Two knuckles, three knuckles deep. At some point—and I don’t think this would be normal for a human, but I wasn’t now, was I?—I felt a thick, slick fluid seeping out, and it just kept coming and coming and all I could do was moan as I shoved three, four fingers in, pulling and pushing and holy fuck where was Liam, I just needed him pushing into me and him the only thing I could see, filling up my whole world, his breath, his easy smile, his moon eyes, the bigness of him, the smell of him, the weight of him.

Phone buzzed again. My body was shaking. I was on my stomach now, rubbing my cock against the carpet with almost a whole hand in my ass. Pushing and rubbing. Harder and faster. I needed something real inside me, something solid, something that wasn’t me. Phone buzzed again. I ignored it again.

But there I was, at that same point as earlier. Hovering at the point of release, pushing myself faster and harder and longer and nothing.

I stopped, rolled over, panting. My fingers were covered with, what was it, some kind of mucous, maybe? Kind of greenish. It smelled pretty rank, regretted sniffing that right away. Clenched my ass, released. Needed more of that.

I sighed, looking down my weird body. Just…rolls of muscle, hair. I wondered what I could be if I actually worked out.

My phone again. It buzzed off the counter and right onto my lap. With a sigh, I unlocked it.

I’d been at it for almost four hours.

 

_Hunt: You comin in today tightass_

_Hunt: yo its like 4:15_

_Hunt: dude its busy as fuck lol_

_Hunt: could rly use you man_

_Hunt: dude_

_Hunt: 6:30??_

_Hunt: ok my dads bothering me now about this where you at_

_Hunt: helloooooooo_

 

There were others after this.

With all the shit that happened at the call center that morning, I knew I was on shaky footing. I doubted I would lose my job at Tim’s for one no-show, but I couldn’t risk it. I shuffled to my feet and tried to text a response, but my fingers were too big for the buttons. I cursed my luck—world wasn’t made for orcs, I guess.

My clothes were just a pile of stale sweat and dirt along one window. I grabbed a pair of sweat shorts clinging to the bathroom doorknob, sniffed them. God, I could smell everything. I think I slept in them once since washing them, but it smelled like, I don’t know. It’s hard to describe. Like when you smell a good wine and you can pick out all the distinct aromas. There were a bunch of natural smells, I guess. A kind of acidic smell, a sort of salty one, an earthy one. One a little like iron, one sort of like butter. And then there were those artificial smells—Tide, a soap bar, remnants of that cheap body spray, stuff that seemed pleasing to my human nose but now just lay toxic on my palette. I scrunched my nose, grunted, carefully slid a calve into each leg. As I pulled the sweat shorts up my legs, I felt them stretching and tightening around my thighs, my package. It felt good, I guess, to fill them out like that. I thought momentarily that I should wear underwear, but I didn’t want to ruin another good pair and, honestly, it felt way better now to have the air just flow through there while it bounced around.

A pair of clean socks (thank god), my kicks, a plain black tee that felt like it was fraying apart as I turned my torso, like it was cutting circulation off my biceps. I went to apply some deodorant, but as I lifted an arm to spread it in my pit, the tee audibly ripped under my arm. Just a little bit, but that was that.

I looked in the mirror.

I looked like I was bursting out of cellophane wrap. The Black Ring was mostly dormant now, with just a tinge of orange glowing at the edges. My gut, muscled as it was, sat out a bit. Not like those washboard abs. I kind of liked it. I reached into my sweat shorts and moved stuff around down there, drawing up my semi-hard dick under the waistband so the tip wouldn’t slip out the leg, which was apparently a thing while I was like this.

While I was like this.

If Liam, Hunt, and Ethan all had this same gift—curse, I don’t know—then I had some assurance that this phase could be tamed, controlled somehow. And I would need to do that unless I wanted to live like a recluse in the woods for eternity.

I scratched my close-cropped, but more full, beard. God, I kind of liked it. I poked at my dick, a sort of small third arm nestled under my waistband.

“Heh.”

The apartment complex’s AC cycled on. I noticed my stubby, flared ears prick at the sudden sound, like a cat’s. Everything sounded more complete now, more nuances to every grouping of volume. Whirring and rattling and humming from the vents I hadn’t noticed before. It almost didn’t make sense that this body would just be for pleasure if it had all these extra survival skills baked in.

My phone buzzed again. It was Hunt.

As the phone vibrated in my oversized hand, I looked at myself, cleared my throat. Said some random stuff to the mirror. It was a little different articulating lips around the tusks (I only had two—didn’t Liam get four?), and my voice was noticeably lower, more guttural. I guessed I could just tell Hunt I was sick. Yeah, that would do it. Then I wouldn’t even have to go in tonight.

Maybe I could just hide in my room forever.

I sighed.

“Hello,” I answered.

“Yo dipshit, I’ve been texting you for hours. What the fuck.”

I tried to fake a cough. Failed. I was never a good liar. “I, um, sick…”

A laughed.

“Um.”

A long, high, shrill cackle. “Dude.”

“Sorry, throat’s a little-”

“You fucking did it! Hahaha!” A hoot. “Me an’ Ethan took bets. I said you were too much of a pussy. He called it, I guess. Hm… I owe him money, I guess. Eh, I’ll get him to forget about it.”

“I don’t know what you’re-”

“You’re stuck in green mode, aren’t ya? Ha, I remember my first time. Back in, wow. Must’ve been like 1200 now. I think I was in Norway? If I wasn’t so crazy about fucking I’d probably make a great historian.” He chuckled.

“Don’t…tell Liam.”

A muffled noise, probably putting his hand over the mic. Then, distantly: “Hey, Liam! Your fuckboy talked to the Goat Man!”

“Hunt, fuck’s sake, don’t say that around-”

“Chill, dude. It’s almost 9:00. Place has been closed for an hour. We’re just,” he laughed, “Ethan and Liam are just forking around cow shit bags. Yeah, how’s that smellin, babe? Like my asshole? Ahhh, you like it.”

A moment.

“I’m sorry.”

“Hm, what’s that?”

“Missing work.”

“Hey tightass, I always said you need to relax. Stuff’s not always that serious.” He clicked his tongue. “Actually, wait. There is, like, one thing. Can you get over to the house tonight? ASAP?”

“I’m not doing any weird sex shit.”

“Eh, you’ll come around. But nah. I can do something to help you get beastmode in control.”

“Yeah, this happened at the office. It was…I don’t know if I still work there. I broke one of their…doors.”

Another hysterical laugh. “Fuck, man. Wish I saw it. Yeah, just get over to the house pronto, capiche? See ya, fuckboiiii.” A beep, then silence.

I slipped the phone into my pocket. Against the tightness of my thigh it was just a rectangular outline drawing the soft fabric taught. I breathed a sigh. Relief. A way to control it. I could go in, apologize to…Janet? Was it Janet? I know she told me something else but I couldn’t remember and my brain needed to attribute a name to the woman. I’d say it was, who knows, grieving for a death in the family, or allergies. The bent handle on the fire exit door would be weird to explain.

I laid the condo door against the doorframe again behind me. I guess I’d either have to get handy or talk to the landlord about that.

Maybe Liam could fix it.

Outside, the night was cool and dark and smelled like ozone. Rain was coming, maybe. A shudder went through the trees around the lot.

I settled into my car, the vehicle bobbing and swaying as I dropped in. I tenderly close the door, trying to watch my own strength.

As I turned out of the parking lot down the hill toward town, I looked over the creek toward the factory. I felt like I had to observe it, for some reason. Anticipated. Expected.

Was there a glimmer of red in that high window?

No, probably not. I wondered if I would ever see the door to Arcadia again.

I drove for a time on that switchback road. It began to sputter drops of cool rain, spreading the amber glow of the streetlights in wide halos.

Thunder.

I wondered what this meant about me and Liam. In the mirror, the Ring reflected blackly, like oil on water, like a glimmering shadow. Pan had bound us together, one to help the other. How many of us were there?

What did Pan get out of it?

Thunder.

It sounded closer now. Maybe a little too close.

I suddenly remembered I left Liam’s hoodie at the office, and a new fear crossed my mind. The vandalism, the wardrobe malfunctions, there was that. It could be a one-time thing, maybe. But if they saw Liam’s hoodie there, with Tim’s Landscaping stamped along the back—would they fire me if they knew I wasn’t totally focused on the office, complicit in some other gig?

And what if I _did_ get fired? Would I be able to get back in to get it? At least right now I had the office key.

I unlocked my phone with one hand, looked at the time. At Hunt’s texts from earlier. And I thought about his sudden turn of phrase, something that felt like a veiled warning. _ASAP_ , he’d said. Why couldn’t it wait a couple hours?

I turned south out of town for the city. There was no traffic this time of night—it would probably be forty-five minutes one way. In and out and back again in an hour and a half with the hoodie. No time at all.

As I turned onto the interstate, there was that roil of thunder again on high. I looked up.

Lightning. Blue lightning.

It tumbled through the clouds directly overhead.

“Weird.”

I plugged an AC cord into my phone and turned up the volume on the stereo. Alternative rock, some indie group. The rain started coming down in sheets. I turned my wipers up.

That strange blue lightning seemed to follow me the entire way there. Streaks of heavenly wrath twisting, arcing, amalgamating into a single, hurtling trajectory straight ahead of me.

Hunt called. I ignored it.

I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t know that then.


	5. Great Pan Is Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mythical and biblical forces collide as Logan makes for the city. New characters enter into the mix and things get weird. Er.

The storm came down. There was not a single other soul driving that four-lane interstate down to Harrisburg that night. I remember feeling totally alone, stuffed in a body, in a car, none of it feeling like my own, like it fit.

Maybe that was life. The world changed fast and nothing fit and then eventually it did because it was all you had.

I looked in the rearview mirror. The lightning flared, died. Storm bright light sent that face—broad, thick brow, squared jaw, thick beard, eyes like stony flint, upturned tusks, the thick green skin so strong it felt like hide—all of it into a snapshot, a memory burned into purple haziness as the darkness returned.

Was this who I was, who I am, who I wanted to be?

Did I just get dick crazy and fall into this impossible fantasy?

As I came down into valley, the amber lights of the city spread out like jewels from the 90s, the 80s, an old world. Above, that lightning built and built, knifing down, faster than thought, indiscriminate, shooting into the tree tops and the hills and the steeples and radio towers.

It was at this point I acknowledged I should probably return Hunt’s call.

I patted down the right pocket, then the left. I checked the console, the passenger seat. There it was. Picked it up, tried to minimize the damn music app. All Hunt’s previous messages began popping up as priority since I unlocked it.

 

_Hunt: You almost here dude?_

_Hunt: its been like an hour shitface you comin?_

_Hunt: dude ok im kinda worried pls respond_

_Hunt: pikc up_

_Hunt: PICK UP_

I kept trying to flick through these, find the phone app—I had it buried somewhere, who even calls anyone these days?

Hydroplaning, if you’ve never done it, feels kind of strange. Basically, the road is so waterlogged that your tires lose contact with the pavement. No friction, no breaks, no turning, nothing. But you can feel it as soon as it happens. It feels like missing a step, like a premonition made real. There should be more to the experience, but all your senses say yep, don’t feel right, cap. Good luck.

The cell slipped out of my hands, tumbled under my seat.

The car slid along like soap down a tub.

“Fuck fuUCK FUCK!”

I cut hard right, I slammed the brakes. I heard a snap as my heel punched into the floor. The brake pedal didn’t come back up. I careened right sharply, jerking the wheel so hard it just twisted, twisted, snapped. For a bizarre, timeless moment I just held the steering wheel, independent of the shaft, in front of my eyes in a very well-that-seems-about-right kind of moment.

Then the car flipped.

Over and over down a slick ravine, belly-top-belly-top. Again, if you’ve never done it, it’s a strange experience to explain. A car wreck like this. It happens impossibly slow and fast at the same time. There are moments you’re aware of objects twisting around you, flashes of lucidity. You feel suspended, almost, in an experience beyond your control or understanding. Pain doesn’t come in lurid announcements or diatribes. It comes in flashes, and they aren’t felt until later, after the adrenaline, after the apocalypse.

And finally, absolutely, resolutely, it all came tumbling to a sudden, jerking stop. A tree, I think. Tree beats car. Usually. I blinked. Time skipped. Don’t close your eyes if you have a concussion. Everything was slick—bits of glass, maybe in my eyes. I lifted my hands. My fingers twitched, my hands shook. My head was a war drum. That wasn’t rain, not even mud. Was that…was that blood? Lightning, my high beams still somehow miraculously working. Music skipped, stopped. My blood was thick. It was everywhere. I looked in the mirror. The roof had burst through, a branch or something had pierced it. The shell of sheer steel lower than the rest, scythed right through my face, right down from above one eye and across the nose. I pulled at it—there was no pain yet, just the disgusting sensation of part of me not being what it should. My orc skin was thick, twice as thick as my human form. It was like pulling up a rubber liner below your feet if you cared about getting mud in your vehicle. My nails were still thick, hard as stone, gray-black up to a short point. Something between a claw and a nail. I had to get up, to move, right?

I looked down at my chest, my vision stirring, blurring. Blood there, too. Maybe just from my face. Just pouring and pouring. Exhilarating, somehow, but yeah, not good. I grabbed the seatbelt midway, jerked it sharply. It didn’t tear at all, but something behind me and to my left in the housing cracked and it was suddenly a lot looser and I just sat there for a moment breathing deeply and shrugged the belt off.

Door wouldn’t budge. I elbowed it, hard. Nothing. Shifted a little in my seat, reared back my foot, gave it a sharp kick. Again, some piece of metal snapping, the door folding in slightly. Glass tumbled down over my lap. I was looking up into the storming sky.

One arm out and then another, pulling myself out like some ponderous monster out of a cave. The bulk was the hardest to get over—my weaker, skinnier human form had had a much greater range of motion, and my brain kept saying, hey, dude, just pull your arms in more and lift, but my chest, arms were too big and my brain still didn’t quite register that. Something caught my black tee as I pried myself out, just ripped it right off.

Over the front wheel, arms, chest, belly, legs. I fell down the other side, my car bent like a taco around this immense tree slick with rain, high beams shooting off into the night, flickering, rain catching in their path. I came down hard on my right shoulder, yelped, growled. Rolled over on my back, breathing. A trail of rainwater ran down the side of the ravine into my side. Long grasses and brush that would’ve felt too abrasive, too stiff before felt like the softest bedding now. My head pounded. The thunder rolled, the lightning splayed in the sky, forking and knifing and shifting, hanging for a moment and then skittering into the clouds.

_Keep moving. You have to get up. You have to… You have to keep moving._

I reached back into that before-time, back when everything moved correctly. I think I was about ten minutes from the office at that point. I just had to get up, follow the road. Maybe someone would chance by. I could get a lift.

An orc could get a lift.

“Fuck.”

I would keep to the woods, follow along the road south. Ten minutes by car into by foot would be…how long?

I heard my phone buzzing. A light, LCD bright, flickered in the grass by my foot, slowly sliding downhill. Some luck.

I picked up my cell, wiped it against my chest. Looked at it. Shattered all the way across. Whoever was calling, even if it was Hunt, well, I wouldn’t be able to answer.

I looked up. Lightning, a flash, a breath. The light of it burned, held in the sky as if it was frozen, caught. I squinted.

“What the-?”

I rubbed my eyes. A trick of the light? Maybe I really had a concussion?

Caught in the center of that burning light was some sort of outline, like a figure.

I felt my nose ring burn a little, itch. My eyes crossed with a sideview mirror sitting, split down the middle, a foot from the wreck. And in the mirror, small but there, was another creature.

Pan.

He lifted his brow, looked at me as if to say, you idiot, don’t just stand there. Then a voice, meat deep inside me: “Run.”

Panic. Chemical panic.

I ran.

In great leaps and bounds, never once losing footing. I knew, without really thinking about it, that this body was made for this terrain. The muscle memory was somehow coming up through the centuries, from someone else, somewhere else, long ago. My shoulder was still pounding with dull pain, I could almost imagine it shooting down the fibers of my arm and chest. I grunted, shrugged it off. It still felt wrong but the pain left in that moment. Partitioned off in my memory. A problem for later.

South. Always south. I didn’t see any passing cars, any lights in the dark, save two: the glow of pans eyes, watching me, somehow always standing between the woods as I bounded by, and the blue lightning overhead, gathering in great shocks, always overhead.

 _Run, you fucking idiot, or you’re dead._ Was this thought mine? Was it the Horned God’s? Was it someone else’s altogether?

The rain came down in sheets, came down in droplets that shot through leaves like bullets. Hail, then, gathering and bouncing around in the mud. I would have slipped, but somehow some sense of balance and spacing and gravity inside me counterbalanced to it.

When the voice from up high came, it was a trumpet, a vibration in the molecules of the air and sky, golden and rich, bouncing off the mountaintops, off the hills and trees and rattling the stones:

**“Glory! Glory! Glory to the New World and death to the Man of Old and his weak and wicked Gods! Redemption has come!”**

A shock of wicked blue light shot like a cannonball into the tree immediately to my right, splitting it in two in a quake of violent vision. I recoiled, looked again. There was something smoking in the ruin.

“A…sword?”

Then another, and another. Left and right, flaming swords splitting the forest into splinters.

**“Lust and Chaos are undone! Let the vile passions of earthly men be utterly eradicated! Glory! Honor! Rejoice, O Earth! Liberation has returned to your squalor and filth!”**

A lot of what the sincere fuck went through my head at all this. Flaming swords, shooting from the sky like artillery from a P-40. Dirt and mud shot up all around me, percussive bursts sending my ears ringing. Shards of metal, rocks, split wood ripped across my chest, my back. I shielded my face. The ground shuddered.

Ahead, the chain link fence that marked the office property.

**“Justice and Redemption are let loose upon the world; Sin cannot hold, Evil falls apart! Seraphiel’s sword shall make right the gyre!”**

I didn’t stop. I didn’t slow. I lurched, bounded over it, grasping the top with both hands as my legs led the way, arced over, hit the ground running. The sky rumbled, roiled. Angrily.

I bounded across the parking lot. The lights were all out. If I could just reach the door…

I realized with sudden stupidity that I left the office key in the wreck.

The fire exit. There’s no way they fixed that since the morning.

If they did, I was breaking in, anyway. This was about shelter, now. This was about life or death.

I rounded the corner, through the grass along the building. I felt entirely exposed, was entirely exposed.

I reached the door. Glass was everywhere. There was caution tape crisscrossing the frame.

“Fuck it.”

A quick running start, I took the metal frame and shattered glass with the broadness of my shoulder. It ripped apart like tissue paper.

Inside, there was darkness and silence.

I knelt on the berber carpet, panting.

I thought I understood it all before this. Now, the rules were changing again. I figured it was all cocks and roided muscles and crazy sex, and now I’m seeing a…what? A god? Warning me to run from some…sword-hurling, lightning-ensconced megaphone?

I slowly got to my feet, expecting to find fresh blood oozing from the gash across my face, but I touched it tenderly and noticed it was just a long bump now, brown to nose. In fact, even the slices to my sides and my chest all seemed to be memories now. I blinked, looking around for the light switch, finding it effortlessly. Everything had a sort of green-yellow tinge to it, but all appeared almost as bright as day.

Things just kept getting weirder.

I guess if I didn’t need to hit the lights, I didn’t want to turn them on, anyway. Whatever that thing was in the sky would immediately know where I was—although I had a sinking suspicion that it did, anyway. And I didn’t want anyone outside to notice lights on in the call center and go calling the cops. I didn’t know if my body could take bullets, but I didn’t want to test it.

First things first. I had to find a phone and call Hunt. Was this what he was hinting at? Why didn’t he just tell me? Would I have believed him? I laughed, a little crazily. I supposed at this point I would believe anything. Magic doors and secret worlds and who knew what else be damned.

I didn’t really know where else to look at first. It was a call center. Everything was a phone. I guess the trouble was picking. Out of habit, I returned to my own cubicle. Someone had picked up the swiveling chair from that morning and set it nicely in front of the keyboard.

Liam’s hoodie was strewn on the desk.

I slowed, picked it up. Softly.

I laughed to myself. I wrecked my car over this. I didn’t know it when I left, but all that for a hoodie.

I held it up to my face, the work-work fiber still dense and plush. The gray-brown fabric held memories of him, a hundred different scents I hadn’t been able to smell before. I looked down at my body, shrugged. Lost my shirt somewhere—back in the car? One arm in a sleeve, slipped it over my massive torso. It fit now. Maybe a little bigger than I needed yet, but it fit. Snug in all the right places. I smiled a little. Thought of him that first day weeks ago, it was cold and a little wet out and he just took it out of his locker and gave it to me. No questions asked. He barely knew me.

I barely knew me.

Well, if I had to go running out in public at least I’d have a shirt now.

Even if those sweat shorts were still stretched skin tight and my dick was like a soda bottle up my crotch.

I picked up the phone.

The line was dead.

I checked three more after that until I realized a phone line must have went down in the storm.

That was when the building began to shake.

It was subtle at first. My ears perked at the sound—windows rattling in the walls, plaques shifting at odd angles. A Steelers bobblehead losing its mind. Monitors shifting into cubicle walls. Keyboards tumbling over on padded chairs. Drop ceiling tiles tumbling from their brackets.

A sound like a tornado, like a locomotive. Building. Rushing. Arriving.

A voice like a megaphone, but clearer, crystalline, ear-splitting.

**“Look up! Look up! Prepare the way! A breath from the north, a glimmer of the northern star. Make way for the Sword of Metatron!”**

I think the office was three stories. Windows crashing, electrical lines snapping, sparking, smoking. Drywall crumbling. Down came the voice and the lightning and the wind, crashing in a great chasm down through the ceiling. I hurled myself under a desk.

**“I am here.”**

A final crash, a tumbling of steel and plywood and drywall. Water sloshed in from the sealed, flat roof above, a torrent dissipating to a drizzle as it sparked on the power lines haloing the hole.

I cleared my eyes as the brilliant light shone from the center of the building, turned from me in the envelope of two massive wings, wings like an eagle’s.

The figure, as the brilliant blue glow, the burning light, died, was wearing a sweater vest. And pleated pants. His hair glowed like embers, cooling into a deep walnut, cut clean and short. And his wings…

His wings were tipped with swords. Dozens of them. Shifting, clinking, shining.

I assumed I was hiding, but his eyes fell on me almost immediately, blinking as though adjusting to dim aquarium lighting.

He cleared his throat, the wings folded in, the hair receded into a balding man in his 40s. The light went out like a lamp.

He stepped through the mess, unphased but now covered in dust and rain.

The 40-something guy with eagle wings tipped with swords that hurled himself from a thunderstorm into a three-story office building looked at me with pity, then shifted his extended hand. A silver sword shot down his arm and stepped forward.

“Let no earthly power go unpunished,” he said in a cool voice. “For the LORD has come, and the Old Magic is defeated. As was said in Paxi, Pan is dead.”

When the sword caught the cubicle walls, it sent them flying through the blinds and windows like a comet.

After that it was just me and Seraphiel.

 

It’s one thing to suddenly be granted strength, speed, dexterity, night vision, keen hearing, and quick healing. It is another to have any of the combative knowledge that would make any of that useful.

I shuffled back in the debris. “Okay, okay, now listen-”

The balding man in the sweater vest stepped forward, silver sword traveling up my neck, scraping against my beard, eyes inclined down his upturned chin. “I think I was rather clear, to be quite honest.”

“I’m not really sure what’s going on here.”

He rolled his eyes. “Do I have to spell it out? Lord have mercy, in Greece the simpletons just took heavenly words as gospel. Now, it’s all Wikipedia-this, I-went-to-college-that. Well, where’s your precious science now, heathen?”

He flicked the sword at my throat. I backed, rolled right. Met the sword tip at my chest, hands up defensively. When I breathed, my lungs pushed my breast to the tip. “I don’t know what you are or why you’re here, buddy, but Pan isn’t dead. I literally saw him like ten minutes ago.”

“I am an angel of the LORD and Protector of the Scribe of God, you’re an aberration somehow born of a long-defeated magic, and I am here to destroy you utterly.” He lifted the sword tip up my face, caught it under my nose ring, lifted it. My head followed suit. “And this…disgusting thing shall be saved and thrown into the Lake of Fire along with your twisted soul.”

He reared back, swung it in an arc that let the air singing. I ducked again, rolled left, came up breathing hard to the tip between my eyes. “I’m telling you, Pan is not dead. He gave me this ring. I don’t know where you heard he’s dead.”

“I have no need to answer to you, filth.”

“He’s in the woods, stupid.”

“If he was alive, my heavenly powers would have deduced as much.”

“He’s a god. He can probably hide from you.”

“There is only One God in Heaven and in Earth, and he reigns from above, not from the squalor of this…” The angel motioned broadly with the sword. “Whatever you have going on here.”

I tried thinking back to growing up. To vacation Bible school and youth group and Sunday school. What did I know about angels? What did anyone, really? Maybe a rabbi would help. If only I was Jewish.

“Whatever the case, with this final blow, your curse shall be ended and this bit of vile magic not meant for mortal practice shall be excised from the world.”

Outside, a police siren.

Red and blue lights danced across the chaos.

Seraphiel looked up in confusion. “You would call your soldiers against me? Your foolishness knows no bounds, mortal thing.”

“You blew up commercial space. What did you think would happen?”

“I am unfamiliar with this quadrant of space, but rest assured that the heavens are as innumerable as your punishments shall be henceforth.”

“Police! Open up!”

Distantly, a door kicked in. Footsteps. Cursing.

Seraphiel’s sword began its decent. Like the car wreck, somehow both slow and fast. Like its perceived ponderousness was for me to savor judgment’s finality.

A gun cocked. “Oh, _fuck_ no. Not in my city.”

I looked over. The man was huge, built like a tank. His blue officer’s shirt was like a suggestion more than a piece of clothing.

Is it racist to write he was black? I don’t know. Everything was so boringly white out of the city it seemed interesting at the time. You know, when I had a seraphim’s sword at my throat. You think, oh, I’m going to die—look, minority representation. Hm.

Seraphiel looked at the cop in confusion. “Impossible. Another one?”

The newcomer inclined himself as if he were about to charge. He threw his gun aside like an uninteresting toy. His arms went back to either side and his chest, his biceps all just burst out of his shirt. Like, I cannot stress enough that they literally grew five times their original size in a second. His legs, his ass, his neck. The uniform was gone in a heartbeat and all that was left was a hulking, brown-haired, two-horned…

A heartbeat.

Was he a fucking minotaur?

He decked the angel, plowed him through beam after beam, through cubicles and computers and the water cooler and into the bathrooms. There were hardly any walls left. It was a miracle the place was still standing.

A grunting trot, bare feet crunching debris underfoot, and the hairy, completely naked, hulking cop was standing in front of me as I leaned back on my palms in shock.

“Hey, up here buddy. My cock’s not going anywhere.”

I think it was bigger than Liam’s, but to be fair I never saw Liam’s package when he was transformed. But this one…it just kept going and going. I swear the guy’s balls must have been the size of softballs.

He offered down a hand. I think my eyes just trailed up his popping, vascular arms and just sat there for a good twenty awkward seconds as I tried to form words. The sound of my sweat shorts slowly ripping a dick-sized hole echoed weirdly in the smoking, sizzling, dripping ruins.

He rolled his eyes, shook his head. “Come on. He won’t be out long.” And he just grabbed my forearm, hauled me wordlessly over a shoulder like a bag of dirt, and threw me in the back of his cop car.

He left, returned with the shredded remains of his uniform in one freakishly huge, furry hand. As I watched, he just…melted back into his smaller, jacked, human form. Completely naked.

He looked at the remains of his uniform, sighed, threw them at me in the back while I sat there, dick throbbing.

He looked back at me in his rearview mirror, adjusted it.

“Name’s Asterion. My wife thinks my name’s Justin. You and I are not friends.”

He started to drive. I looked back at the building. Something tumbled inside and there was a sudden fire, the sprinkler system kicking in half-assed. A flash of blue, an outline of wings fanned wide in the dark, and then lightning shot into the sky above and ripped through the clouds.

“You must be new to the whole sex curse thing,” he grumbled. “We’re going back to my place downtown and having a nice, long chat. Got it, orc boy?”

I gulped. “Y-yes, sir.”

He snorted, but I saw a sort of half-smile in his eyes.

“That’ll do.”


	6. The Myth and the Minotaur

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Logan and Justin retreat into the city to lose Seraphiel, and Justin reveals the divine conflict between the Old Gods and the One.

We must have passed ten brew pubs on the way downtown. As Justin’s police car skipped over potholes and brick roads, the city passed us by. It was like someone slipped apartments into a sprawling factory—as we drove, it seemed like the usual people, vehicles, everything suddenly came back to life, like it had all paused, vanished for Seraphiel’s arrival.

Justin fixed his rearview mirror for what seemed the hundredth time, glaring back at me in something between contempt and concern, the streetlights slipping over his rolling muscle.

“I’m guessing Pan got to you at some point because you’re a horny little fuck and can’t say no, so here we are.” His voice was like listening to a Caterpillar 797 churn over a mountain of earth.

I tried to ask my own question. The obvious one. But every time we hit a bump it felt like my prostate when into overdrive and all I could do was moan.

“Okay, orc boy. Here’s how it goes.” He spoke without taking his eyes off the road, flicking a switch on his radio. “So, thousands of years ago, give or take, the OG gods used to run things. It wasn’t perfect, and it was pretty violent, but we got used to it since we learned how to use basic tools and that’s just how it was. There were all kinds of sick creatures like nymphs and minotaurs and faeries and, well, you. Then for some stupid fucking reason this monotheistic god showed up creatively just calling himself God, and he was pissed that people were, I don’t know, enjoying themselves. At first, the hungry masses bought his line of ‘you’re all sinners, worship me or got to Hell’ pretty quick, but there were some resistors, and while there was resistance, the homebrew gods held on.

“Fast forward to about two thousand years ago. Jesus swings in, apostles go crazy for him. Roman Empire starts to fall and turn to Christianity. It was good timing on God’s part—after the Empire brought so many cultures to heel, the roads and government and good ol’ fashion slavery helped pave the way for the spread of the One God’s message. Things got tight, but then after a bit, Pan noticed some gods just…vanishing. No one worshipped them, anymore, so they lost their power. Pan was like, well, that’s a big oof right there and said fuck that. He had his followers—shepherds and farmers and just crazy sex fuckers—gather in Arcadia and they had this like epic fucking orgy for him to get him all juiced up. Then he was all like, yeah, I’m gonna dip out for a couple thousand years while this cools down, and he selected a few of his most loyal, horny creatures and locked up Arcadia, took it off the map magically, the _real_ Arcadia, and vanished.

“Everyone was devastated. Without Pan’s magic, stuff like, well, you and me couldn’t exist. I went on burner fuel for two thousand years, giving mortals a good fuck now and then for kicks and to keep my immortality going, but no one could morph, no one could really do sex magic, anymore. His followers went through the Mediterranean, throughout ancient France, throughout Ireland. All over the place, trying to find him, but no cigar.

“Eventually, God got annoyed people were still looking for Pan—he was like, why don’t these little humans like church as much as they like fucking, which tells you right there he didn’t really have a clue. So, he ordered his chief scribe Metatron to make sure Pan was def gone. I don’t know what Metatron found, but I guess it wasn’t so clear cut. But God was getting all angsty like little bitches do, so Metatron made a plan. He figured if he could just convince the world Pan was dead, Pan would lose all power to exist. So, he just sent out his seraph Seraphiel with a loudspeaker to tell the whole world, ‘Great Pan is dead! Go about your business, mortals. Oh, and here’s our religious literature.’

“Anyway, Pan would reappear every couple hundred years and bestow his…gift…on a mortal. To keep his magic juices flowing. And then he would be like, good luck with your hyper dick brah and disappear again. Some of our powers returned, but they would fade eventually. Some of them were burned as witches or monsters. Some of us got through the years.

“Then around the 1870s Pan decided to drop anchor in a couple places around the world. Granite Heights was one of them—somewhere unremarkable, somewhere with lots of woods and privacy. We all knew he was back because our bodies started going _crazy_ —I was with some guy working a steel plant a couple miles from here back then and I think I fucked him some days for seven hours straight.” He laughed heartily. “Well, gay. I fucked him gay. He was so fucking gay when I was done with him he was taking loads from any random guy that’d give it back in the refinery.” He smiled dreamily. “Anyway, we got better at hiding, especially going into the 1920s and then the 1970s and 80s, you know, the Nixon and Reagan years, those guys needed a good fuck, lemme tell you. Some modern magical theory helped us control our gifts.”

The police car hopped the concrete into a parking lot by the station, an old brown brick building with tinted floor to ceiling windows. It was probably around midnight by this point.

He whipped his vehicle around, backed in smooth and fast, and took his key out of the ignition. “And that brings us to today. Looks like since no one taught you how to control your sex drive, Seraphiel picked you out on Angel Radar, and you went blabbing about Pan being alive, and Seraphiel’s gonna go back to daddy Metatron and be all like, what the fuck man I thought you told me to say Pan was dead? And angels don’t get the second chances humans get in God’s eyes—straight to the pit with ‘em.”

I shifted around in the back seat, trying to sit in any position that would keep my ass off the smooth, black seat. I could feel something deep and animal pounding inside me, somewhere between my dick and my asshole. “F-f-fuck…”

“Yeah, you’ll probably say that when Seraphiel throws your ass in Hell, too.” He rolled out of the driver’s seat and yanked my door open, standing there in the middle of the night, completely naked, offering a hand out. “So, we have to get you under control or every time you start to go into assplay mode and your sex magic starts going into overdrive Metatron will know, and then eventually he’ll find Pan and the game’s over.”

I looked around cautiously as I got out, shifting my thighs while I tried to ignore the burning ache in my ass. “H-how are you not, like, concerned your totally naked right now?”

He shrugged, leaning into the back seat to gather up his shredded uniform and yank his badge out. He rotated his arms, popped his chest a bit. “If anyone was watching me right now, they’d be cumming. And they’d thank me. Let’s get you inside.”

As we stepped up to the door and he punched in a code into the pin pad, other thoughts came to me. “Well, how would he know Pan’s around? I could just be crazy.”

“The Ring. Only Pan uses that magic. He gives it to his most loyal followers.” He grinned. “Or his worst enemies. Breaks them down.” The door popped open, we stepped inside. Florescent lights flickered to life down a hallway of white-painted concrete block and aged linoleum flooring. “If he gets any of our rings,” he said, flicking his bigger one in his septum, “he’ll be able to track down Arcadia.”

“You…said you have a wife?”

“It’s 2019, orc boy. Bi representation.” He motioned in front of him to some stairs leading into the basement. “Let’s go.”

Warily, I went ahead of him. “And what do you mean by ‘game’s over?’”

He snorted. “Pan’s bringing back all the Old Gods. The Old Magic.”

We rounded a turn, down more steps. “Why? How?”

He slapped my butt. “Maybe after your initiation, orc boy.”

My body shuddered. I grabbed the rail, panting, bending over in front of him.

Justin patted my shoulder. “Nope, not there yet. Let’s go.”

Shaking, I started down the steps again. “It’s just this body. That wasn’t… I didn’t mean…” Two levels. Three levels. Did basements even go this deep?

“Yeah, you did. Orcs only come in two kinds, tops and bottoms, and they like dudes and they like them big. Other creatures have different preferences, orientations. Minotaurs are always bi tops. Sirens shift their own sex between male and female and can do whatever, but they’re bad at relationships. There’s fauns, those guys are basically gay twinks, then there’s nymphs, dryads, pixies-”

At this point, I just didn’t even care, anymore. I started massaging my asshole with two fingers down my shorts. I walked a little funny. “Mm. Y-yeah, fauns.”

He just kept going, but something about the timbre of his voice seemed to say he was just going through the motions. He brushed his hand gently over my low back. “Sometimes, if a mortal gets fucked good enough, traces of myth genes resurface. Back before the boring God, people and creatures used to fuck a hell of a lot, some had kids. But then the Old Magic left the world and their children all seemed human. Get ‘em really going and they lose their minds when I pop their cherries and little horns shoot out their faces, or their legs bow into goat legs. It’s fucking beautiful.”

One of my fingers slipped in my ass. I snapped out of it, pulled my hand out of my pants, looked at my fingers. That same greenish, thick fluid that looked kind of like snot.

“Yeah, that’s a thing with orcs. Make your own lube, and your body uses up a hundred percent of everything you eat, so there’s never a mess down there that a dick doesn’t make.” Justin sighed. I think his footfalls sounded heavier by this point. “Not as much fun. Love fuckin’ ‘em dry for a bit,” he groped his huge dick, “and they usually beg for this meat. They cry and bite the pillow but eventually they go all bottom mode for me.”

“I’m not just a bottom—how would I even know? I never actually, you know…”

He slapped my back, laugh booming down the stairwell. “Trust me, orc boy, you’re a total bottom. You’re an orc. Only one way or the other, and if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be fingering your asshole in front of a complete stranger.”

I felt myself blush. “I-…Um…” I cleared my throat. “How much deeper does this go?”

He laughed again. Deeper, louder. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“I’m serious, dude—what the hell kind of police station is this?”

It was right about when I forgot how many floors we’d gone down, the point when I looked up and couldn’t see the first landing, anymore, that we came to the prison cells. They stretched in five directions as far as the eye could see.

“What’s a minotaur without a maze?” he said.

I turned around. The stairs were gone. We were surrounded by some benches, lockers, cuffs hanging on pegs, old green desks covered in reems of paperwork. Before, when I looked him straight on, my eyes would come to his neck. I was standing at full height, in orc mode, and looking at him right at his fury, distended belly button.

Well, I would’ve been if his massive dong wasn’t in the way.

“Holy fuck.”

He laughed, took a step. The maze rumbled. “I’d stretch out your guts a bit for your top, where ever he is, but we have some work to do. Got to get your magic signature sealed from Metatron.” He bent over, growling. “Uuurnf… Ugh…” And just like that, the brown fur, the horns, the bulk, his dick half as long as my whole body all shrank back together and he was just a six-foot-something, jacked cop again.

He cracked his neck. “Sorry. Gets harder to control it in my own domain.” He motioned down one of the jail cell halls, looking no different from the four other options to me. “Ever get a tattoo before?”

This was one of those moments when I felt gross to admit that, based on some deep, weird longing to play into traditional male stereotypes, I’d always wanted to get one that made me look, I don’t know, fierce. Wild. Instead, I said, “No.”

“Ah, a virgin. Alright. So, here’s the deal. First, we have to talk to my manticore friend…”


	7. Sealing Sin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Logan descends into the labyrinth and beyond as the minotaur reveals the nature of the enemy and the conflict to come.

The minotaur’s labyrinth was seemingly endless. Justin stretched a wifebeater over his popping chest and grabbed a pair of sweatpants that left little to the imagination from his locker—with my orcish sense of smell, I could tell he never washed them, and with my extremely gay thirst, it took great effort to take my eyes off his swinging bat under the plush grey cotton.

The halls were all the same, twisting this way and that. Bare, poured concrete floors, modern jail cells, overhead fluorescent lights buzzing in my short, pointed ears. Justin kept grumbling to himself the longer we went on, sometimes clenching his fist. I could feel a sort of thick, dense energy radiating from him in waves when this happened, and those moments when I walked beside him, I noticed his dick tensing, too.

“Stay behind me, orc boy,” he growled. “We don’t have time for how long I’d take fucking you right now, and I really, really want to wreck ass right now.”

I tried to change the topic, as much for my focus as his. “So… Where did the gods come from? Why can’t they just…get along with the One God?”

“Hm,” he paused, thinking. “Don’t know, honestly. Only the gods, themselves, would have known that, which I guess basically just means Pan now. As for the second question,” another pause. He gripped his shoulder with one hand and rolled it. Every time his pit opened, hairy and musky built out like an inverted pyramid, my head swam a little, I imagined things, I ached down below. He stopped, caught my eye. Grinned. “Yeah, I don’t know. Guess one god being more powerful than all the others is just bad for balance, or maybe the One God just wants different things than the others. Again, not stuff I would know.”

I shook my head. “Feel like you should know all the info before you fight for someone.”

He eyed me. “Who said anything about fighting?”

“Well, that’s what a resistance does, doesn’t it? Fight tyranny?”

He laughed, booming. “Heh, naw. I’m not gonna fight Seraphiel so much as fuck him and make him my bitch. Can’t wait to hear that angel sing for my cock.”

I cleared my throat. “Ah, so… You said earlier I have a top. I’m not really with anyone.”

“Normally, I’d say that’s an offer for me, but that’s not how orcs work. Pan makes them in pairs—you’re bound to another orc for, well, I guess forever. And if you don’t find him and start fucking soon, well…” He laughed, patted my back.

“Well what?”

“Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter. The longer you wait, the harder it is to resist that for orcs. You’ll get to a point where he’s the only thing you can think about. What’s the lucky fella’s name?”

I stuttered. “Um…”

“We all know each other in these woods, buddy. You can tell me. Us magic fuckers gotta stick together.”

“L-Liam.”

“Liam? Big guy? Blonde hair? Out up in Granite Heights, yeah?”

I looked down. “Yeah…”

He stopped, looked down at me. “We’re not doing this.”

“What?”

“Put your fucking head up, orc boy. You’re not some pussy angel like Seraphiel or Metatron. You’re not some basic ass faun. You’re a fucking orc. Be proud of that.”

“It’s just… growing up, my family…”

He shook his head. “Look, boy. I’ve heard it all before so many times. I can see from the way you carry guilt. Shame. You grew up in that usual American house. You were told all sex, all kinds, all that good stuff is a perversion, a one-way ticket to hell, and you internalized that over the years. Yeah, sure, sex in marriage under the watchful eyes of God is okay, but even then, even talking about that comes with a sort of weightiness, a shame. And don’t even start talking about what your body wants—you want cock and a big, meaty man and that’s outside the plan. This kind of shit is what Pan is fighting against, what we’re struggling against.” He put a hand on my shoulder, steadying. “Like it or not, you’re part of this now, this struggle, and you’re gonna soldier up, pick up your fucking head, and you’re gonna grow a pair. And being a bottom isn’t any less manly. It takes guts to take cock.”

“I, um…”

“Pick up your head.”

“It’s just…”

“Pick up your goddamn head, son.”

I did. Slowly. I looked at him looking down at me, firmly but sort of lovingly. Not necessarily in a sex-crazed way. A kind of fatherly way, I guess. Those stony brown eyes, the clean, squared jaw.

“Shoulders up, too. Not running a fucking daycare center here.”

I did so. It felt odd.

“Here’s what’s gonna happen, orc boy. You’re gonna suck it up and get that tattoo to get some control over your gift—and it’s a fucking gift, you got that? And then you’re gonna go back to Granite Heights and find your man and you’re gonna ride his cock with pride because that’s what us masc races do. And that’s not for everyone, but it’s okay if it’s for you. If that’s what you want. And it is, because that’s who you are. And you’re gonna make him cum so hard he goes into cardiac-fucking-arrest and you’ve got cum shooting out your damn nose. You got that, orc boy?”

“Y-yes.”

“Yes fucking sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

He smiled, eased back a bit. “Good boy.”

“Then what?”

He grinned. “Then we’re going angel hunting. I meant what I said. Metatron screwed us over once, but we’re not giving up. I’m gonna make Seraphiel my bitch, and then he’s gonna help us take down the Scribe of God.”

 

We passed many cells. The maze, itself, seemed a living thing, sometimes shifting and parting before my eyes. If this seemed remarkable to me, Justin said nothing, lumbering with a sort of diligence. After some time, we came to an old door, a thick wooden one with a frame painted with splitting green paint.

I looked at the apex of the arch, and there was a numbered carved there enameled in gold. “Huh, Haven’t seen that since middle school,” I said offhandedly.

“Roman numerals,” Justin said as we approached. “Surprised they even teach it at all, anymore. Pretty and useless. Like cursive.”

“Eight. Just eight? Eight what?”

He snorted. “The eighth circle, kid.”

“Eighth circle? Is that…part of the maze?”

“Minotaur mazes are all connected to all other mazes, prisons, traps. That’s why they’re damn near impossible to escape, or to find the center.”

My ears perked. “The center? What’s the center?”

He smiled wolfishly. “Ask Liam, sometime.”

“So, this isn’t really part of _your_ maze?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“Sorry.”

“Nah, it’s cool. Reminds me of a chick in the 60s. She worked on the Space Program.” He laughed, held his stomach. “Real freak in the sheets, know what I mean? But fuck she was smart.” He knocked on the door. “But, no. It’s not part of my realm. Geryon is a good guy, but he’s one of the OG manticores.”

“Geryon… Why does that sound familiar?” It was just on the tip of consciousness, memory. Like an inkling of a thought.

Footsteps approaching from the far side. Something wooden, a table, maybe, scraped along a stone floor. A muffled cry, a door slamming. More footsteps. Closer to the other side. Closer.

The door opened.

It was dark inside, a sort of suffocating, thick darkness, dizzying, staggering. Like looking into a deep well.

The slender figure that stood there was wearing only a green bathrobe, hanging loose and open all the way down. He had black, curly hair and broad, handsome features. A sort of goodness, innocence. Trustability.

There was a fleck of blood on his flat, chiseled stomach.

Justin folded his arms, assuming some kind of power stance next to me, cocking his head to the side a little. Geryon seemed to glare at him, growing in suspicion, anger.

Then the moment broke. Both them laughed, embraced.

“Asterion, you old bull, how are you doing, my friend?” Geryon’s voice lilted and rolled, but the language did not seem quite natural to him.

“Booked a guy for 90 in a 45 yesterday,” Justin replied, shrugging.

“So, pretty goddamn boring, then. A pity. You know, of course, that we can always use more…creatures of your particular talents.” He clicked his tongue. “In the second circle, say?”

“We talked about this, bud. I’m a free agent, not some prison warden.”

Geryon smirked. “Whatever you say, minotaur. I may keep a prison, but you keep a labyrinth. They are quite similar in many ways.”

“I have to work my charms on ya or you letting me and my pal here in?”

Geryon smiled. “They call me the Eater of Men for many reasons. You do not have to seduce me to get a good blow job, my friend.” The manticore turned his eyes on me. “And who is this? A new distraction for the minotaur?” He tapped a finger on his chin. “Ah, no. Your proportions, your lust, the tusks… Hm… Ogre? Orc? Yes, an orc. Asterion could do little to quell that hunger in you, my poor little orc.”

I felt my neck bristle. “Little?”

He laughed again. “I joke! Goodness, orcs are so sensitive about matters of size.”

“This is just my, um, transformed body. I’m normally-”

The manticore cut me off with a quick hand to my mouth. “I am a master of lies, little orc. Your true form has always been inside and has now been set free. Pan is of the earthly gods—like men, he can only transform and nurture what is already there”

He retreated. “Come, enter into my realm.”

As he turned, I caught the glint of something in the dark just beside his head, but then he was gone into the gloom and I could not make it out.

I felt a wrongness as I stepped forward. My heightened senses picked up a pervasive, stagnant moisture, a moldiness, and my ears the dripping of water, the groaning of deep rock in the earth. Sounds I did not know experientially, but somehow deeper within me. Were these things all men knew, embedded deep in our psyches from a time, millennia ago, when this was our world?

“Okay, move it, boy,” Justin said, and shoved me in.

It felt, on some level, like stepping into a tomb.

A blue haze fell over everything as the darkness shifted, a sort of glow. Crystals of some kind, and luminescent fungi. It was a cave, yes. But more of a cavern. A world. It stretched on and on into the distance, stalagmites and stalactites, ravines and ridges and rivers, glowing lakes so still they seemed just ominously glowing pits, and a ceiling so high it stretched into implication, and winding high and low ridges rounding boulders and cliffs and chasms high and low.

I looked down at myself.

My hands.

My clothes.

My…body.

It was like I was a child in adult’s clothing. I had to pull everything up.

“I’m…human?”

“My flames reveal the lie, the skin. The membrane of what we think or are told we are.” Geryon motioned to a small, simple table beside the door, now slowly closing in a sheer rock face. On it was an oil lamp with a single, black flame. “I assume Asterion has brought you to seal your magical signature. Since he so rarely comes by for the company.”

Justin cleared his throat.

“I owe him many favors, so it is just as well. Take my candle with you and I shall make your human flesh real again. Come.”

He turned, bathrobe swooshing. I think there was a JC Penny tag still on it.

Then I saw the glistening, black tail, like a scorpion’s. Cocked up from his low back to just behind his kind face, twitching.

By the time I snapped out of it—the realm, the manticore, the impossibility of it all—Justin and Geryon were both far ahead of me. The manticore stopped and called back to me. “Have you never been to Hell before, little orc? Come, I will do this favor, but I have much work to finish.”

The eighth circle. The circle of fraud. Geryon. I’d read it all in classic lit in my second year at college.

“This is fucking Dante’s _Inferno_.”

 

The path through the eighth circle was like a ribbon, seeming both carved and natural, at times raised above great pits and glowing lakes and at others sinking down to run between high walls of stone marbled with that same glowing crystal.

“You may feel the geological components of this circle seem chaotic, unordered,” Geryon began as we walked. “You will see many things on closer inspection. Such as the deep pits, containing such as the One God sends down my funnel from the higher levels: seducers and flatterers. A lot of bank executives, lately.”

“Don’t need a goddamn tour, Geryon,” Justin grumbled.

“Well, if you called more often, I would not feel so lonely that I did such things, my friend.” Geryon stopped before one of the pits, casting his hand over the deep dark. He looked back at me, nodded me forward.

I looked at Justin. He shrugged. “Just make it quick.”

I approached.

Geryon smiled, his scorpion tail twitching. He splayed out his fingers over that measureless, dark depth, seeming to go on for a mile, maybe two. I squinted into that darkness far below. Something was…moving

He smiled. A bright, wicked light flared below, casting his face in a new dimension, a new harshness, a casual violence. A face of a serial killer, maybe.

The pit spread forth out of sight. The bodies that writhed within, millions of them, seemed like worms, ligaments and flesh twisting and snapping, moaning and screaming, scorpions among them, huge and black and shiny and vile, stinging and scraping, twisting through the layers of bodies above and below, between arms and legs and bursting out of mouths as lumps surged up through necks and they tried to hold it back but the legs, the legs just poked out of the lips and pried their way free.

I felt sick.

“This place, these rings of Hell were made by the One, and the One has been empowered by mortals. I do not know why it is that humanity treasures such terrors as these, nor why a god would relish such punishment, but I have been made its keeper. The choice was simple: guard the punishment of errant mortals or face annihilation like the other gods and creatures of myth.”

“Is this…is this what waits for me?”

Silence for a moment.

“I know Pan’s plan, little orc. But I do not have faith in a fledgling god to resurrect all others, and I do not have faith in even them to defeat the One. I will grant you magical protection as a kindness, but it is likely I will hear your moans and screams at a time not too distant from this moment. For that reason I compel you not to fail.” His hand retreated, the lights went out. The moans diminished, but I could still hear the chitinous clatter of legs and spines and barbed tails. He walked on.

Justin firmly clamped a hand around my shoulder and squeezed. I kept looking into the pit.

“Best we move on,” he said.

 

We came at last to the central lake, its surface like aquamarine glass, languid, illuminated. It smelled like salt water, but stronger. Like something that would preserve the dead.

In my hand, Geryon’s black flame sputtered in the oil lamp.

Geryon tipped his scorpion’s tail in the lake, and retreated it quickly. The water was viscous and glowing on his barb. He motioned me over to a stone table, as long as a body. “Through this lake one would reach the ninth circle, that of treachery. I do not dare set foot in that place, but from here I can make use of its power.” He swept his upturned hand over the elevated stone slab. “You may lay down.”

I eyed him, the table, suspiciously. It seemed oddly occult, maybe unsafely so. “Will this…hurt?”

He grinned.

Justin grumbled behind me and gave me a shove. “Get to it, orc boy. You’re a liability until this is done.”

Dutifully, I sat down on the slab, shifting my shorts around, resettling Liam’s hoodie on my shoulders. I handed the lamp to Geryon, his barbed tail raised over his shoulder and dripping that glowing fluid. He took it and set it beside my head as he pushed me down on my back.

“What is to come will be quite painful, my boy. Both this ritual, and all your life to follow. It cannot be undone, and your body with rip against itself each time your dominant form emerges, such as in fits of lust, or danger. Some draw pleasure from the experience—orcs usually, but I cannot say for certain, as cases are often different. It is no easy thing emerging from a lie, especially one such as this. When it is done, your magical signature will be sealed from the Heavenly Places. Are you prepared?”

I looked over at Justin, who stood resolutely in his sweats, arms crossed, saying nothing.

I nodded.

“Good.”

He snapped his fingers—dark, thick iron chains shot from the four corners of the table, clamping roughly around my wrists, my ankles, drawing them taught to each end. “The fuck?”

Geryon cast his hand down pityingly across my cheek, face long. “It is a painful process. Should you move too much, the seal could be disturbed and have quite the opposite effect—I have no love of Heaven, nor any desire for the seraphim to descend on my dark domain.” He drew his bath robe tight across his abdomen and tied it off. “Now, little one, what form shall this tattoo take?”

“I, uh… I didn’t really think about it…much…”

Justin snorted. “He’s an orc at heart. Just give him that orcbro look. They all like flexing those tribal sleeves.”

Which was, of course, absolutely fucking correct. I tried not to think about it. I remembered growing up, the dialogue around tattoos. A sort of desecration of the body. I thought of college, of the kinds of people I knew. The artists and the actors and the writers and the musicians. The hipsters and the professionals. All those people I still missed, still loved, but the way they talked about these images, these shadows. It made me feel guilty, like I did then, when I’d laugh along with their judgments of, well, bro trash. But it just…got inside me. I loved it. The fierceness of it, the banality, the primality. We all have our tropes of who we present as, who we are. Why should this one be wrong?

I smiled a little.

Geryon raised his brow. “Hmm… Yes, there is a sort of poetry to it. A small truth to complete the lie.”

“Shouldn’t I have, like, taken this hoodie off first?”

Geryon shrugged. “It is just an idle thing.”

His tail shot down faster than I could respond, faster than I could take a breath. “Wait! WAIT!”

But it was done. Geryon’s scorpion’s tail had cut the entire right sleeve off, revealing the whole of the shoulder and halfway down my side under the pit. He flung the sleeve away like it was nothing.

“Why did you have to do that! That was…”

“Mm, special. Yes. From him?”

I looked away toward the glowing lake. “Didn’t have to do that.”

Geryon shrugged. “Get another.”

“You don’t get it, man. He was…his smell was on that.”

The manticore shrugged. “Peculiarities of species. I care not.” He motioned with a hand and the chain on my right arm released slightly, allowing him to reposition the limb for his work. “Try not to move.”

And he began. The tail shot down, dancing along my skin in a breakneck speed. First contact felt like a scalpel was drawn across my flesh, and it burned. It burned like hell.

Moments rolled into minutes rolled into hours.

I felt something inside me, something immaterial, shift and struggle. Something in my inner being. Like a guttering flame, or a stifled breath. It felt like choking, gasping, but I breathed fine. My body convulsed a bit, settled. Then again, more violently.

“Steady!” Geryon shouted.

The burning, the scraping, the needled pricks. Cascading down my shoulder, down my upper arm, down to the elbow. Down past the elbow, dancing above the wrist. I tried to focus, tried to calm myself, but the suffocation, a spiritual feeling, worsened. My vision blurred, color drained. I shivered.

“I got him,” Justin said at some point, effortlessly pinning me down. “Finish it or we’re fucked.”

I was sweating, cold sweat. I felt a sickness well up in me. _This is the lie_ , I thought. _What you tried to break free from all this time, now it has you again. You will struggle against it all your life._

At a certain point, there was nothing.

Sound, all sensation, all feeling of restraint was gone. I lay on the stone table, felt the cool of it against my back.

I heard the sound of leaves and birds.

A soft ruffle, a breath. The smell of the creek.

I opened my eyes.

The golden sunlight, dappled through the leaves. I sat up, looked around. Distantly, through the trees, I could just make out old brick walls, the ceiling that was there and not there, the sky that shifted below, inside, above the not-ceiling. The golden sunlight, running orange and then red.

A shift of wind, a shiver in the earth. The birds quieted.

A voice, inside me. Vibrating in my innermost being, in parts of me that made me hard. A voice that owned me.

_Welcome to my domain, fledgling little orc._

He emerged from the trees, one goat leg in front of the other, all chests and arms and belly and ass, his goat’s horns a majestic flourish above his head, balls the size of grapefruits and a cock as big as an arm rolling in his hair, dripping, always dripping.

“I-how? How am I… here?”

 _Arcadia—I returned your spirit while your false body is fashioned for what is to come._ He spread his fingers at me.

I looked down.

I was huge again. Huge, a little hairier than last time, and green. And completely, utterly naked.

Embarrassed, I shifted my legs, covering myself as best as I could.

A booming laugh, both inside and outside of me.

 _You cannot hide your true form from me. I unleashed you. You are my flesh as much as this._ He grabbed his massive cock with a hand, hefting it, jerking it a little. _Let me see you._

I looked off, anywhere but at him.

_You want to be seen. Let it be a pleasure. Reveal yourself._

“I just…”

A sigh. Birds flew from their nests into the sky. _You must listen to those creatures you encounter. The minotaur is right—you are far too ashamed, too guilty without crime. But your lust can set you free—here, I shall stir it in you._

“Wait, here, I’m sorry, please,” I stammered.

_Hrmm… Yes, you talk because you are ashamed, afraid of the carnality, the bestial lust inside of you. Your form develops, revealing who you truly are, but your mind holds you back. Let my lust fill you and free you._

I don’t know what I expected, but as soon as he started caressing his balls, it hit me like a tidal wave. From inside, from that beautiful spot, that g-spot, that tight pain that feels like part of me is on fire, then spilling out my asshole, tickling down that fleshy trail down to my balls, tantalizing them as they struggled to cope with the sensation, jostling, spasming, blood running out of my body, out of my brain, maybe, straight down my shaft, strengthening it, hardening it, making its tip a pressured stone.

 _Hmm_ , Pan groaned, deep, throaty, and it vibrated through me, waves of it. I stepped off the stone table, trying to orient myself, trying to get some sense of control. But it was too much. He groaned again, his fingers travelling up his huge, hairy sack, and I bent forward, legs jolting as my dick kept getting harder, harder, so hard it physically hurt, like it was about to explode from every fleshy angle.

_Yes, and that Christian rite, that is not right for you, how they sliced your skin as a babe, mutilated you, twisted your desire, muted your passion. Let us undo that circumcision, that detestable testament of the One God._

And slowly, impossibly slowly, he dragged a single finger up the underside of his shaft, and I felt my skin stretching, thickening, a sheath around the head, pre dripping out of me in clear, sticking web.

“Ahhh,” I groaned, my mouth now gaping. I dropped to my hands and knees, fingers twisting in the soft, slick grass. “P-please…”

Pan waggled a finger. _Only your top can provide what you truly desire. I will only…mmm…heighten your pleasure, unmake your mind. Awaken the latent, animal sensations, the yearning of your flesh, made from earthly things and bound to them._

Instinctively, I arched my back, my ass bouncing in the air, begging for something, anything, inside of it, filling it. I glanced at myself, dripping, dripping, shoving my ass up and back, my dick twitching like nothing I’ve ever experienced, foreskin gathering the pre and letting it dump down in generous globs into the dirt, my asshole burning, pounding, quivering, dripping that green fluid, that lube that orcs spew like molasses.

And I just lost it.

Something in my brain just…I don’t know if it broke or fixed itself. Maybe both. A short-circuit, a sudden alignment. Like a computer fried but the planets aligned. It was like a dawn, the dawn of the world, the first cells crawling from the primordial ooze to evolve and fuck and struggle and die. Time and space and earth all one, the history of passion, of life, running through my misfiring brain. I could hardly see straight. All I wanted was Pan’s massive, sweaty, musky cock, ensconced in that beautiful pubic hair, those tumbling balls. I wanted to run my tongue up his scrotum, suck in that musk, that scent, let it drive out oxygen, drive out everything I needed to breath, to live, because all I needed to live in that moment was his massive cock down my throat, my neck, choking on it.

Pan smiled. _You may be my new favorite creature. Alas, it is done._

Just like that, color, sound sensation, everything rushed together into my consciousness, my eyes, my ears and nose and skin, a rush, a symphony, a blinding light.

When my eyes peeked open, crescents of light, I was in a completely normal police office, in a waiting room, the clock near 5:00 AM. No labyrinth, no circles of hell, no demons or scorpions or creatures of myth. And a coffee was presented to me as I lounged on an old sofa, maybe picked up curbside, unwanted, plopped in this waiting room, a stiff but warm blanket draped over me. I accept the cup, drank, looked up.

“Rough night, kid?” Justin asked, cleanly arrayed in uniform. “Sun’s coming up. Take a ride with me.”

And that was how I got a tattoo sleeve.


	8. Beast Within, Beast Without

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Logan returns to Granite Heights, but things quickly escalate in the quiet town. The Minotaur struggles with his own demons.

#  Chapter 8: Beast Within, Beast Without

Justin pulled his cop car into Granite Heights a little over an hour later—it was out of his jurisdiction, but his shift wouldn’t start until that night and apparently minotaurs never tire. I rode in the passenger seat this time, not the back, and sat awkwardly in clothes so stretched by my orc form that they seemed like bedding on my human form. Liam’s hoodie, the entire right sleeve incised with prodigious room around the shoulder and under arm, rested against my impressively unimpressive body.

I scratched at the tattoos running around the top of my shoulder and all the way down my right arm, a jagged, synchronized network of black ink, barbs and spikes and swirls and contours. My skin was still pink, but it healed overnight, it seemed. Likely a relic of the orc healing boon.

Granite Heights was north of the city by about an hour, up a bit into the heavily wooded Appalachian Mountains. I had always drove down to the city for work, so I had never really paid attention to the views. In the early silver light, we rode around windy, clifftop roads, vertigo setting in as I beheld what laid in wait around every mountain face—plummeting, forested valleys, innumerable creeks inky black ribbons or gushing white waterfalls down sheer slate cliffs, down tumbling shale slopes, surging down hills bursting with wildflowers, with ferns and shrubs and berry bushes and it just went on and on, the mind-numbing, impossible beauty of it, endless in its complexity, its detail.

“Before the One God erased the Many from the world,” Justin said suddenly, his voice distant, “my patron was always Poseidon—kind of a grandfather, if you will. I was the first, the product of a curse on my mother’s husband. Those early centuries were…rough. Did things I wasn’t proud of.”

I looked over to him, sunlight glinting off his badge, casting deep shadows into the liberal cleavage from his popped buttons at the chest. I could have seen an animal sexuality in him then, but in that moment, there was just the nakedness of his humanity. There was a sadness to it, one that felt old and real and rarely shared.

“Poseidon’s gone now. Forgotten and erased by the forgetting in all but a, well, academic sense, I guess. It’s a weird thing not having a god of your own, like a piece of you is missing, a passion, a direction. I wasn’t glad to serve as a punishment on the king, but damn if I miss it! Miss those times—the myths were _real_ then, and fuck, I got to slam ass every time someone wandered into that labyrinth.” He laughed. “Be glad you have the god you have—I know little of him besides that he’s the last one creatures like us have left, but he seems to really work for you.”

“I…don’t really worship him or anything. I don’t pray.”

“Worship takes many forms. Some demand sacrifices, some demand actions, some temples. You ever look into what yours likes?”

I distinctly remember not responding—I had my guesses, but for some reason, this moment felt like it was more about Justin than me.

“Anyway, when you get back, you should be good to go. Seraphiel is still out there, hunting for you, for me maybe. But he can’t find you or me without a trail, so now he’s running blind. He’ll probably have words for Metatron.” He turned down into a larger valley, into the woods and town I knew. We passed familiar places as we rumbled down main, down the potholes patched so many times they were a recurring joke. Missy’s Diner, Paul’s somehow brandless gas station and convenience store, the “Gold’s Gym” that wasn’t a Gold’s Gym.

Justin pointed over to it as we passed. “Word of advice? You’re going to morph in and out of your orc form, ‘specially if you’re boned up. For some races, that don’t change much, but for orcs that means a lot of shredded clothes. My thought? Bulk up. Get your human size closer to your true form and your clothes will be a little bigger.”

As we passed, I looked over at it, remembering that night working out with Liam. I leaned a little in my seat, feeling that hunger crawling up my hole, whimpering a little. Imagined the bigness of him, then the bigness of me. Bit my lip. “Mm… Fuck.”

We pulled up the hill to the condos. I walked to the door, turned back to Justin. He just nodded in that way guys do, that matter-of-fact kind of way. I returned it and he drove off.

My door was fixed. There was a bill just inside the door on the floor. My landlord’s first line was, “I don’t know how you did this, but don’t do it again.” It cost me $200.

The news kept piling up. I flicked on the small Samsung TV on the counter—the office was all over the headlines. No one could explain how the building sustained such damage. The official news said it was a gas leak. Others said it looked like it was struck by a meteor, or aliens.

The conspiracy theorists weren’t far off. I flicked it off.

The blinds were drawn. I idly tried to remember if I had drawn them, or if they’d been that way.

I’d have to get a new phone. Fuck, a new car. And I lost my fulltime job.

I drew my hand down my face. “Christ.”

The lights flicked on.

“Indeed,” came a voice.

In the corner, sitting on a cheap chair I didn’t own. She must have brought it.

I immediately went for my phone to call the police.

Oh, right.

I backed slowly to the door. “What is this?”

The woman shifted, crossing one leg over the other. Black slacks, black top, sunglasses for some bizarre reason. “Relax, Logan. We have some things to discuss.”

“I don’t think I want to-”

A sturdy hand clamped over my shoulder, halting me in my tracks. Warily, I looked back.

“That is Agent Stone,” she announced. “He enjoys breaking spines. I tell him not to. But if it comes to it…”

I turned back to the woman, who faked a helpless shrug.

“These things happen. And no one will miss a hick from a backwater town like this one.” She got to her feet, crossing space like a ghost, a wraith. “I am Agent Wolf. I trust you have a moment to talk about the events of last night.”

“The…events of last night?” I tried to fake it, too.

She shook her head, clicking her tongue. “Agent Stone?”

It happened so fast nothing even registered until it was done. He planted my face in the drywall like a flyswatter striking a fly. The room shook. I remember a flash, then his enormous hand pulling me back to my feet, just palming my head like a basketball. Shaking, my hand went to my face, felt blood. I think my nose was broken.

I blinked through the pain, the curtain of red. “What the fuck, lady?”

“Hm… Mhm, yes. That would be quite bothersome for any normal person, wouldn’t it?” She stepped closer, peering into my eyes. “But you’re not a person, are you, Logan?”

“What does that even mean?”

She shrugged. “Agent Stone, please seat our friend.”

I resisted a little, but a glance back at Agent Stone’s wordless, emotionless expression told me there was more where that came from. Slowly, I sat in the corner on Wolf’s chair.

I noticed Agent Stone carried a red jar in one hand.

“Now,” she said diplomatically, “we will just give this a couple moments. If the face heals, we know there’s more to you, Logan, than you let on. Then we can talk about last night.” She approached the blinds, flicked them open. “And about your friends.”

 

They had been together for three years. Asterion had had many loves over the years—love used in many different ways, some more kind than others—but Renee had been the kindest, the most normal, the closest to normal, familial, structural love he had ever experienced.

It was strange how much you could, having never experienced a thing, crave it so badly, and then, after finally acquiring it, find it has lost its color.

He made dinner as he usually did. She had always found it strange of him, this big city cop, busting drug houses and taking down armed thieves like training dummies. Yet here he was, slicing beef into cubes, chopping onion, crushing garlic, throwing it all in a skillet.

He let it brown, shifting it idly. He remembered a Venetian woman showing him the recipe one morning—how long ago was that? Six, seven hundred years? Time had lost meaning to him since, demarcated occasionally by kind loves. Like Renee.

He drizzled in the wine and vinegar, added the usual culprits—rosemary, bay, and so on. Cooking, in some ways, felt like magic to him. When he thought about it, maybe these evenings were the true things he craved. A taste of the simple things denied him for so many centuries, millennia.

A curse, echoing through all time.

Renee was an office administrator at a local charity—she told him often, talked about her coworkers, about their feuds and home lives and things that they said. She had gone to school, got her MBA in business administration. Then she went back for an MFA in cultural traditions. They met in Fira three years ago and, on that irresistibly romantic, mystical Mediterranean sunset, married by a rock in the shape of a heart.

She had insisted. He didn’t know what to say.

Didn’t know how to warn her.

She still didn’t know.

A voice inside him, every evening he returned, waiting for her to come trotting up the stairway, jingle her keys, set her things by the sofa. _She will find out, sooner or later. She will discover the animal you are. The freak._

In memory, an old man said to him, his lantern flickering in the sharp storm’s wind: _Beast within, beast without._

At least if she was a creature, like him, he could talk to her about those things. But there was nothing special beyond all that made her impossibly everything that he wanted. Beautiful. Smart. Observant. He had to be careful with that last bit, sometimes.

He had fucked her to the moon and back a hundred times and she remained steadfastly human, even if she had trouble walking for a day or so. He only went that hard on weekends.

And completely barren.

Her flats patted up the concrete steps outside, nearer, nearer. The keys jingled. The door creaked open. “Stifado,” she said, easing around his waist, rubbing against him. “Mmm. Did you learn this one at home, too?”

He smiled, sighed. The sound and breath caught in his throat, he coughed it out. “Something like that.”

“It’s always an adventure with you,” she said, kissing him lightly and retreating to the sofa. Picking up a book—he could always hear the way the spine stretched.

He added the tomatoes, the shallots, let it all simmer. Poured two glasses of wine.

“Mm, thanks, hun,” she said, barely looking up from the page, accepting the glass, taking a sip.

He sat next to her, the sofa audibly moaning under his weight—it was propped up at one corner by a dumbbell. He wrapped his arm around her, flicked on the TV and muted it. She curled into him.

“Did you know,” she said as his mind wandered, “there is an old Greek word for the inward journey in a story?” She laughed—the wine was getting to her. “Not that it meant this exactly back then, it was sort of a term for a journey to the shore from inland, or down a hill. I look for it now, ever since reading of it once. What is the inward journey, the introspection, of this or that character? I need to see it for them to feel real to me, worth rooting for or against.”

“Mm,” he mumbled. _Katabasis._

He got up, served two plates, brought them back to the sofa. Renee inhaled it, smiled, kissed him—he smoothed her hair, black, glossy, in so many dense curls it was springy to the touch. Another two glasses of wine. Set the plates on the ottoman. She curled into him again.

The images on the screen kept flashing by. A bombing in Egypt, the WWE match of the century, some cartoon about a duck. Static. He kept flipping and flipping, letting his mind wander. No, he did not sleep—he couldn’t, it was part of the curse—but sometimes, rarely, his senses would dull enough that he could dream, regardless, remember the countless assault, the unending march of the ages back through his mind’s eye. He remembered the war that would end the world, and then the sequel. He remembered the burning of the library of Alexandria. He remembered the crucifixion. He remembered Gorgias and his stupid statue. They came and went, just like the channels, out of order, out of any sequence of importance.

And then he remembered the cave.

 

It was inevitable in the end. I could no more resist the healing process as I could gravity. My body just did it and that was that. Outside, the sun had set.

And then they knew I was not human.

Agent Wolf smiled pleasantly, removing her sunglasses.

Her eyes were red.

“Now, then. Let us begin.”

Agent Stone moved to my side, then behind me. I could feel his gravity, somehow. Like a lingering threat. A promise.

“How old are you?”

I blinked, not expecting such an innocuous question. “I…”

She focused on me. On my face. Close her eyes, inhaled deeply through her nose, exhaled. Looked at me again with those strange, red eyes. “Answer me truthfully. I will know.”

I told her.

She squinted at me, turned her head. She was somehow pale like a porcelain doll, but fierce, with sharp features. Eyes that missed nothing. “Mm. Yes, I believe you.”

“Well, I’m not lying.”

She looked up, presumably at Agent Stone, then back at me. “If you truly are so young, then how do you come to have a Black Ring?”

I had almost forgotten, honestly. I became so used to its pull, its texture, and so distracted by the constant assault of impossible things lately that it seemed an anecdote.

“Amazon.”

She looked up behind me, nodded.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever been smacked with a cast iron skillet, but that was what the backhand seemed like. I remember everything in my eyes shivering, like there were five Agent Wolfs and then there was one, and I remember a dense ringing sound, a crack, a shock of violence through my skull, down my neck, a throb like my head was going to grow a new head.

“Do not lie to me. It is not possible.”

“Then why did you have to fucking faceplant me into a wall earlier to prove it?”

“Because,” she said, a corner of her mouth grinning, “I like to watch you squirm.”

She nodded at Agent Stone again.

A gong going off, resonating, like a bowling ball had been shot into my head from a cannon.

“Wait, just let me-”

“Again,” she said quickly.

“PAN!”

She held up an impossibly pale, impossibly narrow hand, inspected me with those red eyes. “Excuse me?”

I panted, trying to regain focus. I could barely hear. “The god from Arcadia. Pan.”

“Hm… That is, of course, not possible.” She paused, turned her head, looked at me. “But no, you are not lying. You will tell me how this is possible.”

I spat up saliva and blood, spattered it down my chin. “It’s… He was never erased, not like the other Old Gods. He…” I looked around, waited an impossibly long moment, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t be heard, or hoping against hope that the Horned God, or Justin, or Liam—anyone—would show up suddenly, free me from this interrogation.

She reached across the space between us, leaned down, took my chin with her reed-like fingers—cold fingers, deathly fingers, fingers like marble—and turned me to face her again. “Pan is alive.” She looked up at Agent Stone, who grumbled something. She nodded and looked back at me. “We suspected some of the Old Powers had survived the purge.”

She stepped away, walked in a circle, tapping her chin.

“Who are you people?”

She shook her head. “An angel landed in Harrisburg last night—were you there?”

“Yes, fine. I was there. Who are you people?” I was almost shouting it now.

Her expression went somehow, impossibly, ashen.

“They are displeased,” came Agent Stone’s voice, each word slow, measured, low. Like the shifting of tectonic plates.

“Hm. It would appear so.” Agent wolf paced the room, turned back to me. “What did the angel want?”

“His… His name…” I paused. There was an offness to both of them, a sort of quasi-humanity. Perhaps they were creatures, too? It would make sense. Wolf’s eyes, Stone’s impossible strength. I should be able to trust them. “His name was Seraphiel. He… He picked up my magical signature last night. I fixed it, though, see?” I showed them the tattoo sleeve.

“Fuck,” she spat.

“What? It’s taken care of.”

“You stupid fool,” she said icily. Then she laughed. “You stupid, stupid fool. The United States has been the stabilizing force in the world for a hundred years, and that has been the product of our allegiance to the One. If there is any mention of an Old God’s survival—in our very country, no less—Metatron will scour the land with his seraphim. And, failing that, the Holy Host would initiate the End of Days.”

“Are you…FBI? Is this a thing?”

“The Special Creatures Unit, yes. We have been carefully monitoring people like yourself since the 1950s. The official story has always been Hoover directed the FBI to investigate, catalogue, and arrest citizens on moral charges of…homosexuality and other aberrant behavior, but it has always been about the Old Ways.”

“What are you…going to do now?”

“Where is Pan hiding?”

“I…”

She focused her eyes on me, the pupils dilating, the red seeming to simmer. “You will tell me, or Agent Stone will turn you into bruschetta.”

 

Asterion stood on the Cretian coast, gazing out upon the angry Aegean Sea. He was young, and also not so young, and the world was also young and not so young. It was long before the time of the One God, before the churches and cathedrals and the hymns and monks. He was the Minotaur; he was the Beast. Others would come after, but he was the first.

The storm reflected his rage, his adrenaline.

He leaned on his haunches, human fingers grasping thighs thick and furry, legs meant for chasing, for running that Labyrinth over and over: find the children, catch the children, eat the children. Thank you, father. Thank you, mother.

Lightning flared, thunder rattled, rumbled—the rock, the cliff, the sheer descent into the inky black-blue sea, chopped into hauling mountains of implacable water like obsidian, slapping, scraping angrily against the sharp rocks below.

He heaved, bellowed, a long, low sound meant for animals, an imperfect channeling of raw, human emotions. Rage, anger, suffering, frustration. It rattled and echoed and died and was defeated by the chaos of the storm, the infinite sea before him. No one would hear him scream. If they did, they would hear only a beast.

He dropped to his knees, gripped the gravel, ground it in his palm, cast it into the dark.

It was then that he noticed the flicker of light.

It crept slowly across the rocks around him, closer, a cold light, like a lamp shining through shallow water, and the creaking of the lamp’s hinge, the rattle of its glass in its panes.

“This is no place for you, Asterion,” came the voice—old, but strong. Like time-tested wood.

Asterion blinked, turned to the voice. He tries to talk, cannot mouth the words. He grunts, bays, whimpers.

It is the Old Man.

He is hunched, leaning heavily on a twisted, olive wood staff, and the lantern hangs from its top, swaying in the sharp wind, but though the rain is hard and pelts with an angry temperament, the Old Man is not bothered by it, though his robes snap and shift in the wind, revealing the skeletal frame beneath. He has a long, white beard, a bald spot, keen eyes. Skin made leathery by the sun.

“There is anger in you, and justified. You have been made to be what you are, not what you wish. Speak,” he said, lifting a hand to Asterion. “I grant it to you.”

And he did. Asterion spoke. When the words left his mouth, they were loud, harsh, unpracticed, but somehow a limitation experienced since birth loosened itself and it all came out. “What hell is this that I must live, to devour children and terrorize those people my father throws in the maze? I…do not want this.”

“You are a man within a beast, and maybe a beast within that man. There is nothing more I can do for you. Out here, you will bring only misery and destruction. You are a creature of domination.”

“Then why am I a prisoner, Old Man?”

Lightning, thunder. A cascade of rain.

“Come to my cave. Follow.”

And he did. Down the winding cliffside, through the torrents of rock and water that bothered the Old Man little, and down to the coast where, in brighter times, a mild beach would wait of powdery black sand. The raging water came to the lip of the rock outcropping they followed, and to the cave, and they went inside.

The path went up slightly, and then down again, and the water collected in a small pool here, crystalline. Asterion followed the Old Man, but as the Old Man waded into the pool, he vanished into a depth that did not exist. The Minotaur stood with only several inches up his legs where the Old Man had fallen into nothingness, and the light shone up in shifting, glowing light upon the ceiling, revealing hanging vines and mosses, dripping water.

A large statue stood across the pool.

It was of a large, muscled man, with a beard and long, thick hair, erupting from waves, from horses, from the sea—fashioned out of ancient marbled, worn smooth, and at its base a small platform, and on that platform several still-burning candles, offerings, burning incense.

“The King of Crete is not your father, as you assume, my creature of death,” came the Old Man’s voice. “Your father was a beast, though your mother was your mother.”

Asterion looked around suspiciously. “Where are you?”

“In the sea, and the storm, and in the wrath,” came the voice. “Look up upon a vestige of me.”

And he did, and he saw the name of the man etched upon the stone altar, and his name was POSEIDON.

Asterion dropped in reverence in the pool. “I did not know. Forgive me.”

“Rise, my creature. You have fulfilled the punishment of the ungrateful king for many years, and I shall bestow some relief from your curse, and offer you a choice.”

“What shall be this choice?”

A rumble outside. The crashing of waves.

“You shall serve my curse for the remainder of its years within the Labyrinth, bringing terror and punishment to the king. He shall die by boiling water, and the labyrinth shall be buried in time and earth, and you shall be free. From this moment, then, you shall be free to assume a human form, and go about them for all the days of the world, and take whatever desires you will from it.”

Asterion, overwhelmed, blinked harshly. “But why can the curse not be lifted from me? I was born to it, and had no action in the judgment that created it.”

A shudder through the cave.

A long silence.

“Poseidon?” he called, voice echoing. “Poseidon!”

The glow in the pool gathered small and bright, and then the Old Man, dry and withered, stood with the lantern held aloft.

“Fulfill the curse and you shall have a taste of freedom,” he intoned.

“But why?” Asterion pled. “Why not just lift the curse?”

“Beast within, beast without,” said the Old Man, and his eyes seemed to glitter, and the shadows overtook him, and then the lantern hung on nothing and fell and shattered and the Minotaur could not speak for many years, and he was only the Beast, and he did as beasts did in the Labyrinth.

 

Everything was red that night. At some point, I remember a noise down the hall—Agent Wolf only nodded at Agent Stone, and he left the room for a moment, and there were hard footfalls and a thumping sound and then a sickly crack, and then he returned and the sound was no more.

It had been…hours now, it seemed. I could barely see out of my own eyes—they were engorged in swelling sores, in the trickle of blood.

Agent Wolf leaned back on my counter across from me. At some point, she had lit a cigarette. Held it regally between two fingers. Inhaled, exhaled. Sighed.

“I grow bored, Logan,” she said after a long moment. “When I do not get what I need, I grow bored. Do you know what happens then, Logan? Do you know what happens when I can no longer get what I need out of you?”

I tried to answer—something smart, witty. Instead it came out as a garbled whimper.

She took a long drag on the cigarette, crossed the room, snuffed it out on my neck. I winced as it hissed, as she dug it into my exposed flesh. “I could have Agent Stone crush your skull and we could call it a day. No one would miss you—not here, away from your family and your home and don’t you feel alone yet, Logan? You wasted your time, your money, your potential to come to this train wreck, this dump, this perfect example of the lows of human ability.”

She walked away. “Mm, I apologize. I seem to have lost myself. No, I would not have you killed. We have other ways of breaking a person.” She turned, looked at me acutely with those blazing red eyes. “Human or…otherwise. Where is the entrance to Arcadia?”

“I…never told you…Arcadia still exists…”

She smiled. “But now you have.”

Slowly, I closed my eyes. Tried to. God, it hurt.

She paced the room, supposing. “Mm… Pan is old, one of the oldest. Not the most powerful, but he is wily, yes. He would ensure there was not one, but several entrances, in case one was compromised.” She stopped, turned to me, eyes narrowing—always narrowing. You would think they had reached the point of diminishing return, but no, somehow, impossibly, they seemed more keenly aware of everything with every passing moment. “My assumptions are correct, of course. In your position, you would have laughed, snorted, made some show of the error of my judgment. Such a thing would be a comfort to you. But you remain silent. I am correct.”

Wolf came close to me again, so close I could hear her breath. She smelled fragrant, like a delicate flower. But her face, after all of this, was anything but. Ravenous. “I am very, very old, Logan. I have been at this for many years. I have many ways of revealing the,” she brushed her fingers against my cheek, “hidden things. When I have my senses on a trail, I am…unrelenting.” Closer still, whispering right into my ear. “No one is coming for you. No one is here for you. There is only me. Make this easier on yourself—just tell me where Pan is hiding, and we will be on our way.”

I grumbled. I tried to say something at this point, but my voice was hoarse, and my head was a throbbing, pounding mess, and my face so swollen. It was impossible.

“I will even sweeten the pot. Reveal the Horned God’s domain to me and I will pull some strings with the brass. We can remove that Black Ring. We can make you normal again.” Her voice took on a deadly sweet, singsong quality. “Just like everybody else. No more running from angels or losing jobs. You could work a steady nine-to-five. Blend in. Normal.”

I tried to respond. With everything in me, I tried. The answer I wanted to give was a hunger in me—the simplicity, the stability, the normality. I could walk into a bank and not be afraid my inseam would quadruple. Could sleep without a divine message in my dreams, could live without mythical creatures revealing themselves in every gas station and dive bar.

Normal people.

And then it dawned on me.

“Liar,” I spat. It was almost a shout.

Her eyes widened. “I…do not lie.”

I turned to her defiantly, nose to nose. “There are no normal people,” I replied. “Just freaks. Including you.”

It was shock on her face at first. Shock, because I doubted she lost her bargaining chip that quickly before. It hovered there in her widened eyes, her hanging mouth. Then she seemed to gather her composure, her eyes turning to little slits, the red in them coming alive, boiling like magma, smoldering.

“You play with forces that created the universe, child. It was the One that fashioned the depths of Hell—you have no idea of the offer you just spurned, nor of the torture I could have spared you.”

I thought of Geryon and the circles of Hell and the pit of scorpions and bodies.

“If it’s a sin to defend who I am, then there is no place in Heaven for me.”

She glared at me sharply, fingers caressing my neck. “Poor, stupid child.” She got up, turned toward the door, unfolded her sunglasses and put them on. “Agent Stone, it would seem we have a package for the Inquisitor. Please secure it.”

“With pleasure,” Agent Stone replied slowly, deeply. He gripped me by both arms, hard, lifting me to my feet without pause.

 

Justin awoke in the manner that one awakes from a deep dream, sleepless as it was. He was immediately and acutely aware of two things as he stirred on the sofa. First, the static from the TV as the white flickered and buzzed. Second, that there was an emptiness around him.

“Renee?”

“The demon has awakened,” came the response. A dry, weak voice.

“The fuck you say?” Justin replied, shooting to his feet.

A snap.

Chains of light twisted around his arms, his chest, his legs in a second. He fell to the floor, setting the glasses on the counter tumbling and shattering. He struggled, grunted, looked down his chest to his captor.

A middle-aged man in a sweater vest. A smile—a soft smile, a doting father smile, spread between doughy cheeks above a clean but supple jaw.

Justin stared at the figure as it dawned on him. “How did you get here?”

“I am certain you know the answer to that, demon,” responded Seraphiel. “I took an Uber.”

Justin struggled again, triceps bursting as he pushed—the restraints _burned_ , somehow. Like they were made of electricity. “Where’s my wife!” he growled.

“The sanctity of marriage is such that it is fashioned between a man and a woman,” Seraphiel responded, “and you are neither.”

Soft footsteps. A hand against the island. Renee.

“What…what is this, Justin?”

Her face paled—shock had hit her in the way that it often does, processing things from least important to most important, least obvious to most obvious. Never mind the magic bindings of light, nor the strange man in the sweater vest, nor the obvious threat he posed. Or maybe that was Renee shining bright—the most pressing question. What was all of this? What was going on?

Who was he, really?

“Renee, get away from him.” He tried to say it evenly, calmly, but he could feel the rage building in him.

“How is this…how is this possible? What is this?”

Seraphiel looked down his nose at Justin, put out his hand. His gleaming sword burst to life. “Does not this mortal know of your true form, demon?”

Justin closed his eyes. _Fuck._

“What does he mean, honey?” Renee said uneasily.

Seraphiel’s sword tip rested against his chest. “ _For we cannot do anything against truth, but only for truth._ Let the truth be revealed.”

A shock of light. Hunger filled him. Hunger and rage and lust and fury. It washed over him, it sunk into him, it brought out its likeness from deep within, knocking at the door of the Beast, banging, breaking it down, lassoing him, drawing him out kicking and screaming.

He tried to fight it. But it was so _strong_ —the Beast _and_ Seraphiel. He tried to hold it back, felt his flesh twisting, pulling, pushing. Filling. Felt his muscles engorging, stretching. It was strange how thousands of years ago he wanted nothing else but to be fully human, and now he struggled against what he wanted to be revealed—that hunger, that anger, that animal lust. That bigness, that domination.

And he lost control.

God, it felt fucking good.

The restraints sizzled and burned against his flesh as he grew and stretched, as the Minotaur took over and the brown fur ran over his thickly muscled arms, legs, chest. His bones snapping and popping, his head shifting weight as the neck became a trunk, as the shoulders burst like watermelons. Bigger, longer, scraping against the floor, the sofa went hurtling to the side, he bayed and snorted, he grunted and steam and spit came out and his eyes went wide and wild and the horns shot up and his head jolted and pleasure went down the sides of his neck and still he kept growing and growing., feet brushing against the island and then twisting to the side because there just wasn’t enough fucking room in that small apartment he needed an open field, he needed the _world_.

And then it was done.

Seraphiel and Renee were pinned back against the door.

“Do you see now the demon you thought you loved?” Seraphiel paced around the Minotaur, sword tracing the contours of his immense, heaving body.

Renee just stood there, huddled defensively in the corner by the door. “W-Wha… I…”

With effort, he grunted, rolled over. When his dick rolled over with him, it lolled to one side, slammed against the floor with a meaty thud. It would literally kill a human if he tried to fuck one with it.

Her eyes went wide.

“Degenerate filth,” Seraphiel hissed.

“Holy hell, Justin,” Renee muttered, almost soundlessly.

“That is an oxymoron,” Seraphiel replied, a little irritated. “What say you, mortal? Shall I dispose of this demon?”

She shook her head, tried to clear the big dick from her thoughts. “Are you nuts? That’s my fucking husband.” She stepped in front of him, in front of the tip of the sword. “Get out of our house.”

“He has deceived you, lied to you, misrepresented himself!”

“Get out,” she said, her voice a stone. “Now.”

Seraphiel was silent a moment, considering. Then that heavenly glow burned in his eyes and he looked at her like one would look at meat in the grocery store. “If you will defend him and partake of his vile corruption of nature, then I will have to dispose of you both.”

The sword tip traced Renee’s throat.

“Don’t you dare,” Justin growled. “Don’t you _fucking_ dare.”

“I have no ear for the word of infidels,” he replied.

It was over quickly. A ribbon of red, held intangibly in the air, hovering like a threat, like an invitation, like a delicate promise. Falling, falling, so slowly, so sleepily, gasping, spurting; it was a thing of hemorrhaging, violent beauty.

“You _MONSTER!”_

The angel that looked like your neighborhood dad shrugged and motioned her body away. It was as if she was swept by a wind, an unseen hand, slapped uselessly, carelessly against the cabinets, a smear of blood splattered across the kickboard.

He roared, he twisted, he struggled. The chains seared through his skin. He didn’t care. Tears like fire from his eyes, breath like Hell's own heat. The Beast within.

Seraphiel shook his head sadly. “You did this to her, demon, not I. If you had kept your seductions to yourself, she needn’t have died.”

Seraphiel's blade hovered above the Minotaur's chest, the point pushing, driving, slowly.

“A reckoning has come for you all. The Earth has gone rampant with perversions.”

“That what Renee was, you asshole? A perversion?”

“No,” he replied. He smiled then. A thin thing, a needless thing, as his eyes burned with holy fire. “But then what were those children, those hapless strangers wandering in your labyrinth all those millennia ago? All of those sexual deviancies over the centuries, corrupting he very handiwork of the One?” He shook his head. “No, Renee was not a perversion, a freak, like you. She was…a casualty.”

That was it.

That was the trigger. All of them. All the right triggers all at once.

A haze overcame him then. A bloodlust like long ago, when he operated only by the dictates of the Beast—unthinking, unbridled. In his ears were not the silver words of angels, but the pumping of blood, the buzz of it building into a wave, washing over him, his vision blurring, refocusing, doubling, refocusing, the heat pounding, pounding, pounding.

With a single, ferocious roar, he burst out of the chains.

Seraphiel was too slow, too consumed with his edict. The Minotaur lurched to his feet, the weight of it resetting the room in a chaotic wave of force, up and then down, all the pictures and vases and lamps. His horns went up right through the ceiling, the drywall came down in a dusty torrent, his hulking body chugging forward with the impossible, irresistible force of a locomotive, and he grabbed the angel by the neck with one hand, crushing, crushing, both of their eyes going wide—Justin’s with rage and Seraphiel as whatever supernatural equivalent he had of guts and blood were forced up into his head like a pimple.

“You stupid little fuck! Do you see the woman you stole from me, the woman you _murdered?_ I will _reach_ through your _throat_ right through your pussy and I will fucking rip that sword back through you, out your goddamn _mouth_ , with all your shit and blood still on it, so you can _taste_ the wreck your body is about to become. Do you understand?”

Seraphiel gasped and twitched, a tiny human hand twisting uselessly around Justin's fist, each finger nearing the thickness of his forearms. “May have…made…mist…ake…”

The sword dropped out of his other hand, clattered across the floor.

“Didn’t hear you, ya fuck!”

Seraphiel's eyes glimmered, faded, widened. “Judgment…will c-come…”

Then there was a flash of brilliant blue, a sound like thunder, a crash, an exhale of wind, and the seraph was gone.

 

I remember thinking, welp, this was a cool adventure. That’s all, folks. I tried to adjust my frame of reference to what eternity would be like, what real torture would be like. I wondered what secrets I would reveal. I wondered if Liam would be safe in the end.

And then the first rays of morning dawned and everything happened quickly.

There was a shout, and then the door shot from its hinges—the metal pieces went plinking off the cupboards, scattering across the floor. The door shot forward like traffic on the freeway, sandwiching a shocked Agent Wolf against the far wall.

I looked up, heart hammering.

It was Liam, green n’ mean.

He looked me up and down, eyes softening. When he spoke, his voice had a distinctly husky quality to it. “Hmph. Got a little roughed up, did ya?”

“How…did you know I was here?” I sputtered through swollen lips.

“Hunt figured something happened when you didn’t show. Been waiting since.” He turned his eyes on Agent Stone. “This shithead give you trouble, orcbro?”

I looked between them, practically feeling a static building, an anticipation of collision. “Mhm.”

He cracked his knuckles, grinned. “Let’s get this party started.” He looked over at me again, frowned. “Why ain’t you orced out?”

“I, ah… Some stuff happened.” I nodded at my arm.

“Went all out,” he nodded, chin up. “Sick dude.” He blinked. “That my hoodie?”

“I, ah… Yeah.”

“Stuff happen?”

“Stuff happened.”

The door shifted, rattled, blew off the wall, clattered to the floor. A red mist hovered in its wake, glowing, scintillating. Agent Wolf straightened her back, eyes burning red. She set out her hands to either side, seething with red power. “You make this more difficult that it need be, Pan-spawn.”

“Huh. Didn’t see you behind the big door. Little unfair two-v-one.” Liam grinned. “Always liked bad odds.”

He charged.

Stone stepped in front of Wolf, buckled his knees, leaned forward. He grabbed Liam by the neck and leg, turning him over as his momentum carried him, hurling him out the window.

I think Liam said oh for fuck’s sake, but I wasn’t sure.

Wolf’s smoldering red eyes slid toward Stone. “Go. Take care of him.”

Stone nodded, jumped out the second-story window. I remember what felt like a tremor as he slammed into the asphalt below.

“Now,” she said, a smile returning to her pale face, straightening her black slacks. “Let us cause a little chaos.”

She approached, step for step, slowly, menacingly, stretching out a hand and then a forefinger, and the fingertip burned with that same red power, like smoke and fire and hate. As it neared, it sounded like crackling, splitting ice, like the gargling, staticky pinging of a Geiger counter.

I ducked my head away, turned out of the chair, rolled to my feet. “I don’t know what that shit is, but it’s not getting near my head.”

She grinned, her face twisting into a manic V, eyes slanted, mouth slanted, teeth sharp. Ravenous. “Now, now, child. We both know that the seal you bear protects you, and we both know that it restrains your only defense.”

I tried to recall Geryon’s words about the seal—it seemed an eternity ago now. Lust and danger, he had said. I went deep into me, trying to picture that beast inside, the part of me that felt whole, real, clawing to get out, to bear its skin in the sun. I had to bring that out. Think of the danger. Feel the danger.

She lurched forward, cat quick.

I dodged right, her hand like a claw arcing through the room, red power snapping and crackling. She hissed, turned to me, madness in her eyes. “You dance with a fury, child! I have driven far greater men to madness!”

Again, diving deep, deep inside. Into the forest. Into the trees. Into the dark paths and the long grass and the rocks and their moss and mud and roots. _Pan, where are you, you stupid useless fuck_.

I snapped out of it. She swiped again, nails whistling past my face. She laughed, hissed.

Again, in the deep, dark forest, running in the woods, down the long trails and the wild places. The pounding of my true feet, skin thick like hide, sweat dripping down my engorged form.  Ahead, a break in the trees, a red, warm light. A light like lust and anger. I bounded for it, each stride longer, harder. The trees broke before me, and there was a clearing, and a stone table, and on the table was my human form, frail, weak, beaten, and I touched my skin and then I was on the table and there was a flash of red.

I knelt on the floor, gripping my sealed arm, the lines of the tattoo sparking and crackling with a green light. It burned and tingled and popped. I slammed my eyes closed, gritted my teeth, could feel me coming out.

Then it hit me.

Like a rush, and fullness, a burgeoning, animal emergence, ripping through the human flesh, lifting up, pushing out, muscle and meat and drive and heat, filling out the massively loose, scant clothing, and the heightened senses washed over me in a rush.

She came.

I lunged at her. She was too fast. She laughed.

“You are just a child playing in a new body—you have no training in these things! I was there when Troy fell, when the bombs fell on London!”

She held in the air for a moment, like a drop of oil in water, and then in a blur of red she was to my right, and then left, and then she drew her fingers across my neck and breathed into my ear. “I will not return empty-handed.”

And those fingers came up my face, nearing my forehead, smoldering with that red power, buzzing with that awful, hungry static.

“Have you ever lost your mind, Logan? Have you ever felt your brain rot with rage?” She kissed my ear. “Let me introduce you to insanity.”

Then her fingers twitched.

She hissed, retreated from me. Not wasting a moment, I whipped around.

“Hey, tightass,” Hunt said, holding the red jar, leaning on the counter. “Next time I tell you to fucking be at my house ASAP, be at my house fucking ASAP.”

Not the Hunt I remembered. The orc Hunt. But he still smelled the same—I could smell for miles. Still the same wiry build, the same tattoos over his shoulders and down his chest, the same trail of fur, a bit thicker, down his stomach. He smiled, tusky, dangerous, eyes glimmering. “Fucking FBI.”

“Drop my vessel, you foolish orc, or I will-”

“No need for threats, ya ugly hag. Catch.” He pitched it out the shattered window.

“NO!” Thoughtless, heedless, she was gone in a flash of red and wind, over the window sill and out into the parking lot.

_Liam._ I started after her.

Hunt caught me by my shoulder, shook his head. “We gotta go.”

I looked at him, glared.

“Listen buddy. You didn’t listen last time and look what happened. Listen now.”

I closed my eyes. “Fine.”

“He’ll catch up.”

I grumbled.

Outside, a windshield crunching, a car alarm.

“We need to get safe, regroup. Think of what comes next.”

We stalked down the hallway. We passed the bloody wreck of the hapless bystander that Agent Stone silenced hours earlier.

“What comes next?”

“War,” he said, “unless we can stop it.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
